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Comment by ajennings | Hacker News Reader

If Nader takes enough votes from Gore, then Gore will have the fewest first place votes and get eliminated first.

Then Nader has to go up against Bush and it all comes down to who the Gore voters put as their second choice. It may only take a small percentage of them putting Bush second for Bush to win. https://youtu.be/JtKAScORevQ

Was this election spoiled? By Nader or by Gore? You can argue the semantics of what "spoiler" means, but to me it's clear that IRV doesn't handle this situation well.

It is safe to vote for a third-party only if they can't win. When three-way elections get close, you have to be more careful.

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This hypothetical is so far from the 2000 election as to be unrecognisable. If I'd written "If Nader takes enough votes from Bush..." it would be about as realistic.

In any case, if Gore preferences flow to Bush over Nader, that's because those voters are expressing their preference for Bush over Nader. That's not spoiling: it's literally the entire point of providing a full ranking, is so that nobody's vote is ever discarded and so that any winning candidate must have accumulated an absolute majority.

The parent post said:

> a third-party candidate doesn't spoil an election, because your second-place vote will still count. (E.g. Nader wouldn't have taken votes from Gore, so Gore would have won instead of Bush.)

I was just trying to point out that this isn't always true. Instant Runoff Voting can eliminate the centrist, the best compromise candidate, first.

If we adopt IRV and third-parties grow, then we move into territory where IRV gets some elections obviously wrong. It has happened.

> Was this election spoiled? By Nader or by Gore? You can argue the semantics of what "spoiler" means, but to me it's clear that IRV doesn't handle this situation well.

In that scenario more people preferred Bush to Nader, all the bush supporters plus a few Gore supporters. So no it wasn't spoiled at all, the most popular candidate won and the system worked.

It seems you think the goal is to elect the centerist candidate or something?

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