It might be time to reevaluate voting.
In the recent elections i India, for the first time voters were allowed to vote "None of the above (NOTA)". Incredible as it might seem, 1.1 percent of the voters chose NOTA. In addition, in many constituencies NOTA got more votes than all who stood for election. It might be worth considering this NOTA option in the US..
I do not think cross-voting can be avoided at all. There is nothing that prevents one from changing parties just for a few days around the election date and reversing oneself. In fact this practice has been popular in India in the past; they even have given it a name: "aayaa Ram Gayaa Ram". " aayaa" means came and "gayaa" means went. Party membership becomes a turnstyle. Unless there are clear laws against such behaviour you can not avoid cross voting.
Cross voting occurs for strategic reasons: as insurance when one's own party primaries are a foregone conclusion, and as raiding where one crosses party lines to vote for a candidate who in the voter's opinion does not stand a chance of winning. In case of the Mississippi it was neither. Wikipedia has a short but good article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
There is a literature on the topic in Political Science. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the literature even though I took one of my Game Theory courses at SUPA at CMU (while I was a student at Pitt) from two political scientists, Richard McKelvey and Peter Ordeshook.
In the recent elections i India, for the first time voters were allowed to vote "None of the above (NOTA)". Incredible as it might seem, 1.1 percent of the voters chose NOTA. In addition, in many constituencies NOTA got more votes than all who stood for election. It might be worth considering this NOTA option in the US..
I do not think cross-voting can be avoided at all. There is nothing that prevents one from changing parties just for a few days around the election date and reversing oneself. In fact this practice has been popular in India in the past; they even have given it a name: "aayaa Ram Gayaa Ram". " aayaa" means came and "gayaa" means went. Party membership becomes a turnstyle. Unless there are clear laws against such behaviour you can not avoid cross voting.
Cross voting occurs for strategic reasons: as insurance when one's own party primaries are a foregone conclusion, and as raiding where one crosses party lines to vote for a candidate who in the voter's opinion does not stand a chance of winning. In case of the Mississippi it was neither. Wikipedia has a short but good article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
There is a literature on the topic in Political Science. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the literature even though I took one of my Game Theory courses at SUPA at CMU (while I was a student at Pitt) from two political scientists, Richard McKelvey and Peter Ordeshook.
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