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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

Plurality voting is the best system. You can't view the actual casting of the ballots as the only part of the process. The campaigns and surrounding public discourse are the opportunity for the coalitions of our society to decide on two broad-appeal candidates. The "runoff" happens in conversations between citizens, and in primaries within established coalitions, not inside a ballot counting machine.

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It's not possible for a candidate with zero first preference votes to win [1]. If they have zero first preference votes, they will be eliminated in the first round.

Ranked choice doesn't always get the correct result, but it's a lot closer than a simple vote.

"If no candidate receives a majority, the candidate with the fewest first choices is eliminated and voters who liked that candidate the best have their ballots instantly counted for their second choice."

- http://www.rcvmaine.com/how_does_ranked_choice_voting_work

How are you defining "correct result?" One formal definition could be the Condorcet winner (the candidate that would win a one-on-one election against each other candidate), but some elections don't even have a Condorcet winner. Also note that neither plurality voting nor instant runoff voting are guaranteed to select the Condorcet winner if one exists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion

I'm of the uninformed opinion that any national election will probably have a Condorcet winner. IF that's true, then we could literally pick any Condorcet method, and just go with that.

Condorcet IRV seems a reasonable choice, in that it's relatively easy to explain to people (compare to beatpath, for example).

I think all the discussion about the merits of different methods is just so much bikeshedding. It might matter, but it's far more important to pick _something_ than to stick with plurality!

In that spirit, I am totally in support of Maine's choice to go with IRV, even with its warts.

If you like the stagnation of a two-party system, and want third parties to always have a near-zero chance of winning, then yes, plurality voting is the best system. Those two parties can consolidate their power and permanently keep out third parties, regardless of how corrupt/disliked the two parties become.

Instant runoff, among other things, keeps major parties on their toes and more responsive to the electorate's needs, since if voters are sufficiently angry they have a realistic option of putting a minority/third party in power.

I think that the near-rise of Bernie Sanders, and the successful election of Donald Trump, proves that the establishments of the two parties don't have a complete stranglehold on power.

Not a complete stranglehold, but a near-complete one. Both of these candidates had to jump through the two major U.S. parties' hoops to have a chance at being elected (and one of them was very effectively stopped by his party's gatekeepers).

Sanders didn't play to win and dug his own grave. In one of the Democratic debates: "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!" If I was a Sanders donor, I would have been very upset at that moment.

I am a Sanders donor, and I wasn't upset by it at all. (He was saying they should move on to more important topics).

The point of political campaign is to win, not to take the high ground. He took money from millions of people and flushed it down the toilet with that line.

Wouldn't someone with zero first-preference votes be eliminated as the loser in the first round?

I believe it depends on exactly which ranked voting system you use. I'm removing that bit though because it's not the focus of my argument.

I do think your larger point is interesting, but by editing your comment to take out the part that's driving these responses you've broken the continuity of the discussion a bit.

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