As ACED discussed in our last post, the term “spoiler” is inherently oppressive because it implies that citizens who express minority political views degrade the quality of our electoral process. Because this is the nature of the term, it is doubtful that those who use it always intend it that way, which we mention to make clear that we do not attribute that intent to writers who use it.
Our point is that the nature of the term “spoiler” is consistent with the way the effect that it represents is used in political writing. For example, Joshua Spivak, who asserts that Nader and Perot spoiled the 2000 and 1992 elections, clearly intends to discourage third-party voting. Likewise, election law expert Rick Hasen throws in the “spoiler effect” to his discussion of the potential for corruption in Americans Elect as another “problem” – and another reason to avoid third parties. While Ezra Klein avoids using “spoiler effect,” he describes the idea behind it to show why a third-party candidacy is “wrongheaded.”
What you will not see in any of these pieces is an explanation of the splitting effect that takes into account any political reality besides the dominance of the major parties in our first past the post (FPP) system. As we attempted to show, however, facts absolutely basic and fundamental to a discussion of voting dynamics in the United States (such as the large number of non-voters, the actual positions of the major parties as opposed to their perceived positions, and polling data) should give anyone pause before taking the “spoiler effect” at face value – the only manner in which popular writers offer it.
Again, Spivak, Hasen, and Klein could be right. But the habitual exclusion of a discussion of obvious factors that would seem to belie the inevitably of the splitting effect by third-party votes suggests that they are not merely describing an electoral characteristic of the U.S., but rather that they are pushing an agenda that favors the status quo. If writers, many of whom are experts and all of them fairly well respected, consistently make the naked assertion that third-parties spoil elections for the majority of voters, people will tend to believe in it as a given, taking it on faith.
That is what makes it so dastardly and oppressive. Faith-based support of the two party monopoly is entrenched not by the nature of FPP, in which third parties can influence major parties even without winning an election, but by actively discouraging potential voters through blame and scare tactics. So discouraged, people do not consider all of their options and may vote against their best interests.
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