Talk:Ralph Nader/Comments

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This must be some of the most rotten logic I have ever seen in my life... The text about the impact on the outcome of the election could easily be used as an example in university logic classes as archetypic cases of deceptive reasoning:

"Nader received 97,421 votes. Proponents of this argument claim that Nader pulled votes from Al Gore, and this tilted the election in Bush's favor. The claim is that this was Nader's "greatest impact" on the election. Some of the counter-arguments are as follows. Assuming the hypothetical case that Nader had not been running, there is no guarantee that all of his votes would have necessarily gone to any one candidate."

The hypothesis - CLEARLY - does not hinge on ALL votes going to Gore, only that some 600 votes MORE would go to Gore than to Bush. I don't can how much you love Nader, or if if you ARE Nader... This is just deceptive junk reasoning.

"Given Nader's policy which opposes the two-party system, if his supporters had a similar viewpoint, then it is likely that many of those voters would have abstained from voting for any of the republican or democratic candidates."

Again - whether the thesis is correct has no bearing on the claim that Nader's votes swayed the election. I mean, come on! Even if VERY many voters did what is said here, the overweight of votes to the Gore camp could still easily have been more than the difference to Bush.

"The argument also does not account for independents who may have been swayed to vote for any candidate in any party,"

Again, same thing... It does, it just says that Gore needed almost 0.5% of Nader's votes to win.

"nor democrats who may have "broken party lines" to vote republican, or vice versa."

Which yet again has no bearing... They broke party lines regardless obviously, it has nothing to do with Nader.

"In many cases the number of these votes can easily exceed the total votes won by a third party. However, these "swing votes" and the effect they have on the outcome of an election, can be less noticeable in a two-party system."

Do I sense some sort of need to construct a clean conscience? "A could be wrong, hence A is wrong" and other wonderful feats of logic... Seriously, whoever wrote this makes a fool out of not only him/herself but of Ralph Nader as well.