How can third parties act as spoilers in elections

IRV proponents have suggested that the Democrat is actually the weakest of the three candidates, because the Democrat is the first one eliminated.

But note, that order of elimination is due to the behavior of IRV, which can be quite erratic. For example, a progressive candidate can enter the race, causing the winner to switch from Democrat to the Republican.

Both score and approval voting handle vote splitting among similar candidates extremely well. This is due to their ability to have equal or similar weight count towards multiple candidates. Approval and score voting are therefore highly robust to the spoiler effect, to the point of being arguably immune to it. The Independent and Democratic candidates split the remaining votes, receiving 37 percent and 19 percent respectively. As an environmentalist, I am not willing to risk anything on the chance that Romney might win this election.

For the first time since , global warming—the most serious issue facing humanity today—was not mentioned during any of the debates. On the whole, neither candidate has demonstrated a deep commitment to real discussion about climate change.

Nonetheless, Obama is clearly more committed to halting climate change than his competitor. If the Romney and Ryan ticket wins, not only will climate change be pushed off of the agenda, but our civil rights will be jeopardized. These two men do not support same-sex marriage. During his time as Massachusetts governor, he vetoed a bill that would have provided emergency contraception to rape victims.

If Americans elect a politician with these values, civil rights in our country will be doomed. I acknowledge that our political system is broken and overrun with special interests. We took into consideration the expansion of the voting franchise through the 15th Amendment, which granted universal male suffrage; the 19th Amendment, which extended the vote to women; the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18; and the Voting Rights Act. We also compensated for historical and demographic trends.

We found that not only do third-party candidacies fail to increase turnout, they are actually associated with a statistically significant reduction in turnout. Put simply, fewer people vote in elections in which third-party candidates receive a substantial portion of the vote. Establishing causality here is a little bit tricky.

To say that one thing is related to something else is not to say that one thing causes the other. Rather, we believe that their success represents dissatisfaction with the choices offered by the two major parties. Voters are then less likely to turn out, and those who do are more likely to choose a third-party candidate. We would like to test that theory by examining voter attitudes at the individual level.

This would involve isolating and comparing the voting behavior of third-party voters with the general voting population in large-scale national surveys such as the American National Election Study. In the meantime, there are some much more plausible explanations for our results. It may be that third parties encourage the turnout of new voters — as Stein claims — but that what is happening at the same time is that the major party candidates dampen turnout even more.

That scenario seems unlikely to us simply because it involves too many moving parts. The more likely explanation, we believe, is that there is an existing pool of habitual voters and that third-party candidates draw their support from voters who would have gone to the polls anyhow.

This hypothesis is supported by research that suggests the decision to vote is not necessarily motivated in the same way as the choice between candidates. Most voters first make the decision to vote, and only then choose for whom to vote.