Re: a hit, a palpable hit! (market compared to election)

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Apr 12 2000 - 23:32:15 MDT


At 12:46 AM 13/04/00 -0400, you wrote:

>> By and large, it balances out, since places on the ballot paper are
>> allocated by chance.

>Are the order of candidates changed for various ballots, so that the
>actual donkey vote has no effect on the elections, or does the ruling
>party take advantage of the donkey vote effect to retain enough of an
>edge in the elections to stay in power?

I was about to say that this is what `allocated by chance' *means*, but now
I'm not so sure. I *thought* candidates appeared in some random order,
which obviously would vary from election to election, but now I'm starting
to wonder if they appear alphabetically by name. If so you could conscript
the donkeys by standing Abner Aardvark, or by changing yr candidate's name
to Aaaah, Wonderful. Of course then nobody else would vote for you
(Actually I might vote for Aardvark).

But frankly, I don't really give a damn... (I'm an anarchist, after all.) :)

Damien



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:09:17 MDT