EVERY SERIOUS VOTER must figure out three crucial pieces of information about a candidate for office: What does the candidate stand for? Does the candidate mean it? Can the candidate be effective?

In most countries where there are strong party systems, these are not difficult questions. If a person runs as a Social Democrat, he or she, like all other Social Democratic candidates, stands for the well-publicized Social Democratic Party platform. The candidate can be effective, because any action is a party action, and the candidate can count on the eager support of every other Social Democrat.

And the candidate means it – because if he or she doesn't, his or her career is over. The party will withdraw its name and support, and the candidate will have to run alone, like an American – and that is arduous, expensive, humiliating, and almost always unsuccessful.

The United States no longer has a strong party system, and here in the land of individualism, each voter must figure out the answers to those three questions individually, and each candidate must figure out how to get this information across to the public – and how to pay for it. (In the United States, not surprisingly, voter participation is lower, and campaigns are longer and more expensive, than anywhere else in the world.)

In most campaigns, campaigns without national press attention, voters must rely for their information almost entirely on what the candidates say and do in their campaigns. Only a tiny percentage of the voters can have any personal knowledge of the candidates, and endorsements are marginal. For most people, endorsing organizations raise the same questions about themselves that are raised about candidates: What do the organizations stand for? Do they mean it?

For most voters, what the candidates put forth, their "résumés," as it were, is about all there is to go on. And reading résumés can be a hazardous activity. Résumés generally contain vast amounts of impenetrable, or purposely befogging, jargon, contain exaggerations and manipulated numbers and descriptions, and would probably contain any number of outright lies if the résumé writers thought they could get away with it.

Fortunately for the voters, however, this dismal situation is improved by the fact that most candidates have opponents. Having opposing candidates improves both the quality and the quantity of information received by the voter. The fear of the opponent's campaign puts limits on lies, exaggerations, and manipulations and exerts constant pressure to refrain from vagueness and jargon.

In a multi-candidate campaign (like many of San Francisco's nonpartisan races, or primaries for which there are numerous candidates seeking a party's nomination), those advantages are gone. Candidates in a multi-candidate race are, like the voters, unclear about who the opponent is, and so they are unclear about what points in their programs need to be clarified or presented in more detail. They have no idea which of their fellow candidates to attack for exaggerations and manipulations, and they have no worries that any of their fellow candidates will attack them. A multi-candidate race consists mostly of candidates mouthing vague and cheerful clichés about who they are and what they stand for as they try to acquire enough name recognition and credibility to distinguish themselves from the rest of the confusing pack. They hope to make it into the meaningful campaign – the runoff – after performing in the multi-candidate circus.