Guerroro argues that the manifest normal mandate is the best description of a political candidate’s support, wherein the manifest normal mandate (MNM) refers to the amount of support expressed for a candidate through the electoral system in a certain area (Guerroro, p.298-299). While Brennan’s “lesser of two evils” paradigm addresses the fact that voters must sometimes vote for a candidate they don’t wholly support, I think that Guerroro misses another important case: the fact that even if a voter supports two candidates for a position, they cannot vote for both of them in a system in which voters only get one vote (Brennan, 2009, p. 537). This paradigm, which I will refer to as the “greater of two goods”, could cause a candidate’s MNM to
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If we look at one individual’s vote in a one-vote system, it is possible that Guerroro’s conclusion could hold; after all, if one votes for the candidate who won, the voter will have increased the MNM as intended. However, Guerroro (2010) is intending to make a claim that applies to a jurisdiction as a whole and this is where he needs to reformulate his argument, as the odds are low that every person who supports two candidates will end up voting for the candidate who …show more content…
An example of one such system is a system in which voters can rank the candidates according to their preference, which would allow voters to show support for multiple candidates by removing the binary condition of the voting present in a one-vote system. In the ranking system, the “greater of two goods” problem would no be longer an issue. To illustrate this, imagine a situation in which a voter ranks Candidate X as ‘1’ and Candidate Y as ‘2’. If Candidate X wins, their MNM will increase and accurately reflect the voter’s consent for them to govern. If Candidate Y wins, their MNM will still increase, reflecting the fact that although the voter supported Candidate X more, they still support Candidate Y to some extent and still consent to be governed by
If we look at one individual’s vote in a one-vote system, it is possible that Guerroro’s conclusion could hold; after all, if one votes for the candidate who won, the voter will have increased the MNM as intended. However, Guerroro (2010) is intending to make a claim that applies to a jurisdiction as a whole and this is where he needs to reformulate his argument, as the odds are low that every person who supports two candidates will end up voting for the candidate who …show more content…
An example of one such system is a system in which voters can rank the candidates according to their preference, which would allow voters to show support for multiple candidates by removing the binary condition of the voting present in a one-vote system. In the ranking system, the “greater of two goods” problem would no be longer an issue. To illustrate this, imagine a situation in which a voter ranks Candidate X as ‘1’ and Candidate Y as ‘2’. If Candidate X wins, their MNM will increase and accurately reflect the voter’s consent for them to govern. If Candidate Y wins, their MNM will still increase, reflecting the fact that although the voter supported Candidate X more, they still support Candidate Y to some extent and still consent to be governed by