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Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

Ranked choice voting doesn't eliminate the winner-take-all, zero-sum nature of politics. That's entirely my point. All political power is zero-sum (the more I have the less you have), it doesn't matter what voting system you implement.

So my broader point is that, given that plenty of other countries don't have ranked voting of any kind and plenty of viable 3rd parties, Americans really have no valid policy argument to make as to why they don't have viable 3rd parties. The only arguments that hold any water are cultural.

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First of all, the countries that use FPTP voting systems and do have more than two parties (like the UK) have the highest measured levels of misrepresentation error in the world, so I don't think it is a goal we should strive for.

Further, I disagree that politics is inherently winner takes all.

For example, ranked choice voting allows that I can be represented by a moderate candidate. If I can't get my first choice (a liberal candidate), I would prefer a moderate candidate to a right wing extremist. In this case, compromise (the opposite of winner takes all) is possible.

Another example is proportional representation, which allows for views with less than 51% of the vote to get representation. So for example, say a Green Party gets 30% of the vote, so they will get 30% of the representation. These minority parties are still often able to implement their agenda by making deals with the other parties. If Green is willing to compromise with either the Labor party or the Conservative party on their union stance in exchange for environmental votes, they can achieve their goals with less than a majority.

I'd be genuinely interested in a paper, citation, article, or whatever for your misrepresentation claim. I've never heard that before (not saying you're wrong).

Can't bring to mind a good book or paper that compares all the countries side by side, but still fairly sure UK would top the list.

For a good introduction to the sad state of UK elections:

> The electoral process is "rigged". In 2005, if you total all the votes cast for the main parties, it took an average 26,906 votes to elect a Labour MP, 44,373 to elect a Tory MP and 96,539 votes to elect a Lib Dem MP. Not since the rotten boroughs of the 18th century have elections been so corrupt.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/democr...

> All votes should be worth the same, right? With First Past the Post votes are not equal. In the last election it took 26,000 votes for the SNP to win a seat compared with over 800,000 for the Green Party.

https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/first-past-the-post

Looking at any recent election will show you the discrepancy quite clearly - the difference they are referring to is the difference between popular vote percentages (nationwide) and number of MPs for a given party (FPTP split by constituency). Parties with high popular vote percentages often get very few to no representatives because they were never the top candidate in any constituency.

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