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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Look, this is really fairly simple.

Would the gentleman in question still be encouraging the students to vote if he knew the majority of them would favor McCain rather than Obama? If he'd still do it, then his concern is with increasing voting activity. If he wouldn't, then he's just trying to increase the power of his favored candidate.

Of course, if he's not an American citizen, then he's minding what most certainly is not his business, and he should have his eyes removed as penance.

That is all.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Should Brian still act non-partisan if the election was between, say, Hitler and Gandhi?

By framing the question this way you've mutated it into another question entirely. The original question was, is encouraging people to vote (without pushing a particular candidate) really non-partisan if you know that in practice most of your audience will vote for the candidate you favor? In this scenario the desirability of non-partisanship is stipulated from the beginning.

In the hypothetical election between Hitler and Gandhi, most people would be unabashedly partisan. The operative word here is "unabashedly". A pro-Gandhi partisan in such an election wouldn't try to pretend to himself that he was non-partisan and thus wouldn't care whether he was acting in a non-partisan way.

Back to the actual scenario, what we have here is a person who is pushing his favorite candidate (i.e., being a partisan) while trying to claim the mantle of non-partisanship. That is where the "bad faith" comes in.

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