The Case for Negative Votes

...Unfortunately, these thoughts will remain forever unproven...

...In addition to its moral effect, the proposed plan may even in some cases affect the material outcome of a race...

...resign or be impeached (according to a November Gallup Poll the American public opposed removing Nixon from office 54 to 37 percent), and more cautious editorials, including those in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, have argued that talk of impeachment and resignation is still premature, smacking more of the capricious whim of popularity h la Fourth Republic France, rather than the U.S...

...Surely any change in our system t h a t eliminates television commercials about l i t t l e girls being blown up by hydrogen bombs can't be all bad...

...Such a system might have been cumbersome in the days of paper ballots, but can be handled with ease by slightly redesigned voting machines...

...If all the k coefficients were slightly higher, at 0.8, Nixon's popularity index would be 30 percent, about the same as Johnson's in his "landslide...

...Likewise, if 75 percent had confidence in Goldwater, k2 would be 0.75...

...but we suffer more because now our beliefs are more ingrained and inflexible than they were during childhood...

...This is sometimes forgotten in the turmoil of a campaign, however, because no one knows for certain where those votes will go...

...I think a good place to start would be for the Republican Party to take the leadership in resolving the crisis of confidence in our government...

...Nothing short of complete disclosure will be adequate to restore the confidence of the American people...

...In fact, if a third, minor candidate has a somewhat inflexible base, such as Wallace perhaps had in 1968, a three-man race takes on some features of a two-man race, and there is no penalty for negative campaigning...

...It is, in fact, possible for the loser, and even the winner, to receive a negative net vote...

...Those votes never belonged to Nixon...

...In that election the vote for Johnson (in millions) was V~ = 43.0, and for Goldwater, V2 = 27.2...

...If 70 percent of the voters voted for Johnson because of their confidence in him, kl would be 70 percent or 0.7...

...Here we see a small material effect on vote differences...

...In an effort to rejuvenate his support among congressional Republicans Nixon spent the first days in November meeting with Republican congressmen and senators, and leading Democrats, but many remained skeptical...

...GOP sinking with Nixon...

...Humphrey's task was only to persuade the voters to vote for himself r a t h e r than against Nixon...

...Perhaps if Johnson had considered carefully the significance of such a popularity index, he might have avoided some of the disillusionments of his last years in office...

...Of Nixon's votes, k~V~ were for him, and (1 - k0V~ were against Humphrey and Wallace...

...The three-man race is more complex...

...The Administration has pursued its independent course to this juncture...

...The three-man race, with one candidate having an inflexible base as at present, can no longer become a two-man race in the sense of scare tactics being used with impunity by the two major candidates...

...Under our present voting system, it is normally important to campaign positively in a threeman race, since taking votes from one candidate only to watch them go to a third is a poor victory...

...Paine, a member of the Clemens household for several years, and Clara, the only one of Twain's three daughters to outlive him, continued the censorial tradition of Olivia Langdon Clemens, deliberately omitting from Twain's biography the unpleasant aspects of his life...

...The youngest Clemens daughter, Jean, was severely epileptic, and for several years, Hill contends, her father was repulsed by her illness and frequently sent her away from his house...

...Then if voting under the new system had been permitted, Johnson's net vote would have been those votes forhim (0.7 • 43.0) minus the number who voted for Goldwater because of a dislike for Johnson (0.25 • 27.2...

...2) A candidate who really wants a mandate from the people will have to present his ideas in a positive form, because the way to increase his popularity index is to increase his confidence factor, k, and t h a t cannot be done by belittling his opponent...

...Let's say that 75 percent of his voters were really voting for him and 25 percent were voting against Johnson...

...The new voting plan removes these uncertainties...

...The Republican Party did not get us into this mess...

...In the NixonMcGovern race, it seemed to be important to many people to have Nixon win with a greater (or smaller) popular vote percentage than Johnson in the 1964 election...

...Using the same reasoning, the net vote for Goldwater would be given by T2 = k2V2 - (1 - kJV...

...If we let the number of votes for a candidate be P (for positive) and those against him be N (for negative), his net vote, T, is T = P - N. Then it is appropriate to speak of his popularity as the ratio of T to the total votes cast in the election...

...Constitution...

...I propose here a slight modification of our voting system that can remove this speculative element from future elections and give us all a better estimate of the true popularity of a newly-elected president and his programs...

...Twain's daughter Susy's death from spinal meningitis a t the age of twenty-five led the whole family to such morbid activities as annual celebrations of her birthday and anniversaries of her death...

...If A impresses a voter positively, he is one vote ahead, but if he frightens a voter away from B, then C profits exactly as much as A. Both A and C effectively gain half a vote (so A has to work twice as hard with negative campaign tactics...

...For the special case, k~ = ks, the result is T, - Ts = ý89 + k,) (V~ - Vs) and since the confidence factor k~ is less than one, T 1 - T~ will be smaller than V - V s. If Hubert Humphrey had campaigned more positively in 1968, with the new voting plan in effect, and had raised k2 to 0.75, while k~ and k3 remained the same at 0.7 the net votes under the new system would have been T~ = 16.9, T2 = 17.0, and T3 = -2.1...

...Of those who voted for Johnson, perhaps 70 percent were really for him and 30 percent were against Goldwater and would have voted that way if given an opportunity...

...Going back to the congressional elections of 1970, there has been little willingness on the part of the Administration to cooperate with Republican Party leaders, let alone seek their advice...

...The actual vote difference between Nixon and Humphrey in 1968, V~ - Vs, was 0.8 million, but T, - T2 in this example is 0.7...

...Note t h a t this uncertainty applies only to elections using our present system...

...This represents a drop of 8 percent from last spring and it compares poorly to the 56 percent to 44 percent in favor of the Democrats in 1964, the year of the Johnson landslide and the stunning defeat for congressional Republicans...

...In spite of this example, the primary effect of the proposed voting plan is unlikely to be its material influence on the outcome of elections...

...Keep in mind t h a t this change in net votes did not require Humphrey by some eloquence to win votes committed to Nixon...

...Instead we see an embittered old man furiously and unsuccessfully involved in speculation, neglecting those who love him and becoming at least p a r t i a l l y responsible for two of their deaths...

...In the strongest terms since Bob Dole (R-Kansas) left the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, dominick went on to say, "The fact that I am devoted to my Party is sufficient reason to speak out...

...In 1968 Richard Nixon was narrowly elected over Hubert H. Humphrey and George C. Wallace, receiving 44 percent of the popular vote, but in 1972 he in turn won a thumping victory over George McGovern, with 61 percent of the vote...

...recently called Nixon "the strongest President of our time" and fellow Louisiana Democrat, Otto Passman, lashed out at the '~radical segment of the news media" and praised Nixon's integrity as "unimpeachable" and his "greatness" as long "established...

...They can be certain t h a t degeneration to scare campaigning will be punished, if only by a drop in their popularity index...

...Humphrey, V~ = 30.9...

...If the proposed voting system had been in effect in 1968, the votes for each candidate would have been T, = kN, - ý89 - k~)V= - ý89 - k~)V3 T~ = k~V~ - ý89 - kOV, - ý89 - k~)V~ T~ = k~V~ - ý89 - kOV, - ý89 - kDV...

...Why did Johnson's voters desert him, and where did Nixon's troops come from...

...Frankly, I am damned mad about it...

...Nixon still ignores his experienced politicoes Harlow and Laird, and instead turns to Haig and Ziegler, political novices who still have not learned that it ain't what ya do but how ya do it...

...Neither can C the moralist gain unduly from the blood-letting of two major candidates...

...We may formalize this development by defining confidence factors kl and k2 for the two candidates...

...Then (neglecting the factor of electoral votes) Humphrey might have won t h a t cliffhanger...

...Johnson's net vote, T~, would be T~ = kN1 - (1 - k2)V2 where the first term, k~V~, represents those voters (70 percent of 43 million) who voted for Johnson because they liked and trusted him, and the second term, (1 - k2)V2, represents those voters (25 percent of 27.2 million) who voted for Goldwater because they disliked Johnson...

...I see these major benefits of the system: (1) It gives the voter greater freedom in making his views known, and it gives the victor (and indeed all of us) a truer idea of voter attitudes about his programs...

...It requires only a little imagination to believe that Nixon had, in fact, as many people for him as did Johnson four years previously and that the 1968 race was close only because Humphrey had fewer people against him than did Goldwater...

...If the equations for T, and T s are subtracted, the vote difference, T~- T2, is the same as the difference, V, - V~, of our present system of voting, so the proposed system cannot affect the material outcome of a two-man race...

...C's voter base is no longer inflexible, except for those voters firmly committed to him in a positive sense...

...For lack of a better estimate, we take ý89 - k~)V 1 against each of the others...

...I think Republicans have more reason to be upset about the current state of affairs than anyone else...

...Behold the Irony But if the Administration's strength still seems to be waning with congressional GOPs, leading southern Democrats have begun rallying around Nixon...

...Olivia's "nervous prostration" which struck in August 1902 and lingered until her death in June 1904 must have been attributable in some way to her husband, because her doctors refused to let him see her during much of her convalescence lest she suffer a relapse...

...Wallace, V~ = 9.4...

...This skepticism is in no small part the result of yet another recent public opinion poll taken by Harris at the end of October...

...In the 1968 race the vote totals, in millions, were: Nixon, V1 = 31.7...

...And there were several...

...We see too t h a t Goldwater dipped perilously close to 0 percent...

...He profits, to be sure, and can watch happily as they knife each other...

...As far as I'm concerned, the working relationship between the Republican Party and this Administration has been tenuous at best for some time...

...In spite of this, the new system would undoubtedly have a helpful moral effect on our presidential campaigns...

...The reverse may not be true, and C's voter base may appear inflexible to A, but not to B. At the other end of the spectrum, a third, minor candidate having a reputation as a "moralist" or as everyone's second choice may profit greatly from the negative campaigning of two major candidates...

...Although our overall goals and policies will probably continue to coincide with those of the Administration, I believe the Republican Party would be well advised to follow a more independent course from here on...

...If we take all the k coefficients as 0.7, we find T 1 = 16.2, T 2 = 15.5, and T~ = -2.8, and Nixon's popularity index is 23 percent...

...According to the Harris Poll the Democrats have a lead of 53 percent to 31 percent in voter preference for the 1974 congressional races...

...As a result, many Republicans are urging their colleagues to declare their independence of the White House...

...The difference in net votes, T, - T2, under the new system can be found by subtracting appropriately in the last group of three equations...

...With this definition of popularity in mind, let us reconsider the 1964 election to see if 61 percent of the voters were with Johnson...

...by Hamlin Hill Harper & Row $10.00 Much of Mark Twain: God's Fool is based on the previously unpublished diary of Isabel Lyon, Clemens' personal secretary, and it contradicts Albert Bigelow Paine's carefully edited Mark Twain: A Biography published in 1912, ten years after Twain's death...

...The lovable American humorist, the teller of children's stories, the impish and adventurous Huck Finn whom we cannot help but identify with his c r e a t o r - - a l l these are suppressed in Hill's book which concentrates on the last ten deeply troubled years of Samuel Clemens' life...

...This can probably be explained by the fact that Nixon, even after Watergate, still outpolls George McGovern with ease, in some congressional districts by a margin of more than two to one...

...Harold Mott The Case for Negative Votes In 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson was elected president in a landslide over Barry Goldwater, getting 61 percent of the popular vote, and yet, four years later, so many of his supporters were deserting that his reelection seemed doubtful...

...But unfortunately Republicans just do not have their [the Democrats'] experience at this sort of thing...

...Under the new system the voter will be allowed to vote for candidate A, or for B, or against A or B. The net vote for A will then be the difference of the number of votes for him and the ones against him...

...The main point, however, is that with the new plan the major candidates will know precisely what part of a vote is gained and lost...

...The same thing could be said about Goldwater's voters...

...Voters frightened away from A by B will vote for B or stay home...

...One liberal Republican, when told about the increasing Democratic support accruing to Nixon, quipped: "I have said all along the problem with this Administration is that it has behaved as if it were a Democratic one...

...One is tempted to speculate that Johnson never had the support of 61 percent of the electorate and that many voted for him only to insure the defeat of Barry Goldwater, the Mad Bomber...

...When Jean The Alternative January 1974 17...

...Senator Peter Deminick (R-Colo...

...This system puts into practice the expressed wishes of multitudes of voters who seem forever to be choosing the lesser of two evils...

...To a candidate, winning comes first, but the vote percentage (mandate from the people, etc...

...in a speech before the Denver Bar Association said, "There can be no more deals and no more technical arguments about evidence...

...Mark Twain: God's Fool It is r a t h e r like being told there is no Santa Claus to read Hamlin Hill's biography of Mark Twain...

...But if anyone can create the environment conducive to impeachment it is this Administration, and not the left wing of the Democratic Party...

...Some of the characteristics of this plan are interesting...

...Under the proposed plan, the voter would have more freedom to express himself, and his motives would be more apparent...

...We see t h a t the popularity percentages do not add to 100 percent...

...The all-important chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Edward Hebert (D-La...

...is important, too...

...With the proposed voting system a candidate might win an election by frightening voters away from his opponent, but he could not increase his own popularity, as measured by the net, T. Perhaps this might lead to t h a t much-desired end, a candidate stressing his own strong points rather than his opponent's weaknesses...

...In our example, the equa16 The Alternative January 1974 tions for T1 and T~ show Johnson's net vote to be 23.3 million with a popularity percentage of 33 percent and Goldwater's vote to be 7.5 million with a percentage of 11 percent...

...This would have resulted in a net vote for Johnson of 23.3 million, and we conclude that a true index of his popularity might be 23.3/70.2 or 33 percent rather than the 61 percent attributed to him...

...Keep in mind the warning that this is sheer speculation...