EconTech

It is a simple matter of expected payoffs. Unfortunately, my gambit install seems to be refusing to cooperate, so I can’t draw the diagram I want. Nevertheless, it can rather easily be explained.

If there is no consequence to breaking with the pack (voting outside, in this case, early, your allotted time) and there are potential benefits to doing so (in this case, getting an early decision on which candidate will have the most momentum), then you have every incentive to try to break with the pack, get your benefits, and if they fail to come, go ahead and ‘redo.’ Played this way, there is minimal incentive (a few million to rerun an election in a state of that size is not such a large sum of money) to NOT deviate, play your hand strong, hope for the best. If the best doesn’t come, then back up and play with the group. This is EXACTLY what is happening now (AND they are trying to get other people to pay for the revote, the only cost seems to be some dignity, which politicians lack anyway).

I’m sure I am biased by the revote increasing the space Obama would have to lose. Of course, there are also agency problems here. The people who suffer (presumably the voters) are not the ones who decided on the timing of the election (the state politicians). But this is a fact of democracy. You get what you vote for. We believe in this to a large extent (we haven’t impeached Bush yet), but we do believe there are limits to this notion. As evidence against the bias, before this all went down, I thought the states were being silly by trying to force the DNC’s hand on this issue, which is not to say that I am a big fan of how important the timing of the elections in the states SEEMS to be.

Note that this is not entirely a democratic (little ‘d’) question. The parties have no obligation to run themselves as a democracy, only how they run the country. Of course, anyone who sees the parties run knows that is the case. The question is, how far are they willing to go to maintain party discipline. The rules do allow for a revote, but I oppose any move to have  the DNC, or anyone other than the states themselves, foot the bill. If they want to game the system, that is, apparently, their choice. But make them pay the costs of that game.