The mayoral election and the prisoner’s dilemma

“If Ford wins this thing,” I joked earlier today, “I’m moving to that American town that all those Kerry supporters abandoned in 2004 (they followed through, right?)”

My friend Peter – yes, the same Peter who writes that blog I just told you about – replied by drawing an even better parallel. “It’s funny that you say this,” he said, “because I was just thinking of this election as being like the 2004 US presidential election: a dimwit with Tea Party appeal versus an unappealing and uninspiring alternative.”

He’s right. You don’t need an American two-party federal system to produce such a dreadful range of choices. All you need is another bullying oaf who’s got a lock on the right, another uninspiring and somewhat condescending centrist, and another left-leaning public servant with great ideas and no chance of winning.

If that sounds harsh, then I’m sorry – particularly when it comes to Pantalone, because he’s a good man that would make a fine mayor. But he’s also a distant third in the polls, and in our first past the post electoral system, that means he’s forced to play the Nader role.

Pantalone deserves better than that – and frankly, so do we. But there’s pretty much nothing we can do about it between now and Monday’s election, other than fret over whether to vote for the guy we want, or the guy with the best chance of beating the guy we don’t want.

What a lot of the people leaning towards Pantalone are left with is essentially a prisoner’s dilemma, in which we’re forced to weigh the vote we want to cast against the ways we can only assume everyone else is going to vote. Smitherman has been telling everybody that a vote for Pantalone is a vote for Ford, and whether or not he’s right depends on whether or not enough people believe he’s right.

It’s a search for a magic number, and it’s anybody’s guess. Are there enough Pantalone supporters out there to vote him into office? How many of them are actually going to vote for him, instead of voting strategically? If we vote for Pantalone, are we depriving Smitherman of the votes he needs to keep Ford out of office?

And what if Pantalone were to beat the odds somehow and come within spitting distance of victory – only to lose to Ford because too many Pantalone supporters got scared and voted for Smitherman?

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about this stuff. And you can see why so many people would reject the notion of strategic voting on principle, and just vote for the candidate of their choice regardless of his chances. But of course, you’ve also got to wonder how many people are going to do that, and whether you should change your vote accordingly, and so on.

I think the polls reflect that. Pantalone’s low numbers are due in no small part to the fear of Ford. In fact, as long as we’re throwing a bunch of fun concepts around, the whole thing’s a Catch-22: people are scared to vote for Pantalone because his poll numbers are so low, and his poll numbers are so low because people are scared to vote for him.

We can complain about the lack of decent candidates in this election, but the real problem lies with our electoral system itself. Plenty of us are eligible to run if we think we can do a better job – and indeed, there are about three dozen other candidates in the running right now that most of us can’t even name. But really, what’s the point when it’s all going to come down to a race between two or three key players to see who can get the most votes on a single ballot?

Democracy should never be a prisoner’s dilemma. As Monday’s election approaches, I’m going to try and say a little more about Smitherman and Pantalone alike, along with looking at some of the better arguments in favour of each of them. But I’d also like to talk about alternatives to our electoral system, many of which are actually more democratic than what we’ve been calling democracy. If we want more from our elections than a lacklustre numbers game, then we need to change the way we vote, not just the people we vote for.

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