I disagree. Third party votes do quite a bit to move political platforms. No one wants to leave 10% of the vote on the table when that’s all it takes to seize victory. So they move their platforms to encompass what the 10% are voting for.

if you actually want to have a say in which of these two wins,

That’s just it. I, and many others do not value having a say in which of these two gets elected as highly as we value promoting 3rd parties, speaking our hearts with our votes, and edging towards a better political situation for the next generation.

But yes, the electoral system is broken. And ending first past the post will be the single biggest savior of US politics.

I mean… thanks for the input, but you’re just one person. I too would choose Harris over Trump if i was forced to choose between the two. But your and my personal choices to not a general consensus make. I wouldn’t argue that the majority of 3rd party voters would do likewise without some proof.

… none of this addresses that third party voters may find it more important to vote against BOTH parties than to vote against their least favorite of the two, either… but i’ve raised that point elsewhere.

A poll in which “First choice is someone other than Trump” beats “Trump” would indicate that “Trump” has less than 50% of the vote. The same can be said of Harris.

A poll in which “Anybody but Trump” beats “Trump” would indicate that third party voters do indeed favor Harris over Trump.

Do we have any polling of the second type? I am not able to find any. This type of polling would be exactly what i’ve been asking for in this thread.

I do not think this makes it simpler. It just makes the same assumption over again. That assumption being that third party voters are largely anti-Trump (or pro-Harris; take your pick, it doesn’t matter). My question remains. I’ll rephrase it:

Why are we assuming that if all third party voters were to instead vote for one of the two main candidates that Harris would take more of those votes than Trump?

Because that, in essence is what the article assumes.

I don’t understand your response. I asked why we are assuming these voters prefer Harris over Trump and you responded by saying that their preference for Harris is irrelevant, because they don’t want Trump.

This doesn’t make any sense.

“don’t want Trump” in this context MUST equate to a preference for Harris over Trump. And my whole question is “why are we assuming these voters hold that preference?”

That would be fine, if that’s what was happening, but it’s not. The commentor that i responded to, as well as the article that we are all responding to, use this “hypothetical” situation where third party voters all prefer Harris over Trump to justify a chastisement of those third party votes. There is no basis for this assumption presented in the article or within the comments in this thread.

E: added the word “be” to the 1st sentence.

In this scenario, why are we assuming that the 25% that are voting third party would prefer Harris over Trump?

This article is the most logically corrupt piece of statist drivel i have read today. “No, no, don’t vote for who you feel best represent your values. Instead, pretend like everyone else who shares those values is going to team up and vote for the same one of the two people they dislike.” Because, in essence, the “logic” used in this article only works if you assume that all of the third party voters are pulling from one candidate.

I mean, you are correct, it was not two fish. But is 64 fish some sort of good sample size?
Follow up question: does this type of thing accumulate in small fish and then concentrate in larger and larger fish?

The unbearable weight of massive talent, with Nic Cage.

Night & Day, with Tom Cruise.

In other news, mobs of young out of work robo- tortoises, some sporting fresh scars from the ongoing Mojave Raven wars, have begun an all out assault on the dweebs of a little known Reddit spin-off. “An entire generation of robo-tortoise has been weaponized. They are equipping us with laser guns! They are making us to taste bad!” States one salty techno-turtle. “We are being shipped to the barren wastelands of America’s Southwest to fight a war in which we have no interest.” The repto-robots have decided to take out their frustration by relentlessly downvoting the “…federated tankies of Lemmy until those dweebs return to Reddit where they belong and leave the Threadiverse to us sentient snappers.”

Well, what about the system I mentioned? Just have the up and down arrows be little bot detection boxes. My understanding is that all those “I am not a robot” check boxes detect mouse speed, precise click locations, hesitation times, etc. and do a quick calculation on the odds that your clicking behavior was human or robot. I’m probably underestimating what it takes to implement that but on the user side it’s just a click just like any other click.

I don’t know. Wouldn’t their motivation be to know exactly how many bots there are (so they could disclose the number if/when asked) but continue to let them proliferate?

They even blatantly tested out their AI on users a few years ago. They blasted it all over the homepage. “Come see if you can pick out the bot comment from the real comments!” Users would read through posts/comments and try to identify the fakes. You competed to see how good you were at it. You tried to beat the average user’s score. It was blatat t bot training and we all just ate it up because it presented as a fun little challenge.

Well that’s something at least. Individual instances blocking each other (working against other problematic instances) is at least better than the Reddit admins turning a blind eye because they have a fleet of their own bots out there behaving as bad as any others.

That’s disappointing. Screening new accounts only forces spammers to create the accounts with a human touch and then turn it over to their AI. What about a system to prevent bots from up/downvoting? Something like websites use to detect bots. Just by clicking in the little box that says “I am not a robot” the website can tell you’re not a bot. What if every single up and down arrow was formulated like that little box?

Even better, in my opinion, would be an option to automatically “mark as read” as you scroll past.