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Comment by kyleblarson | Hacker News Reader

Possibly naive question here but in my limited exposure to articles about RCV it seems to be popular in more historically liberal areas. Is that true and why might that be the case?

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New York City is the one driving the news cycle right now (and rightfully so as 8 million people have the potential to use RCV for the first time). And people view NYC as pretty liberal.

But a great thing about RCV is that it's not inherently partisan or favoring of left or right. As a result, in addition to being used in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Maine...it recently passed for use in Alaska and nearly two dozen cities in Utah. That's a pretty diverse set of locales across the U.S.

Article on Alaska: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21537126/alaska-measure-2-ran...

Article on Utah: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/05/11/many-utahns-...

Thank you!

Because liberal (progressive) areas are full of people who are advocating for change. What that change should actually be varies greatly between individuals, so there is lots of fragmentation and in-fighting. The idea that you could vote for your specific niche but fall back to your preferred monolith is desirable because you don't feel like you're wasting your vote by voting for a minor party who will likely never win a seat. Conservative areas are full of people who want to maintain the status quo. They have varying ideas about how things should be but are unified by the fundamental idea that things shouldn't change. Since there is far less fragmentation, there is far less need to give your voice to a niche so they're happy to have their vote go directly to a monolith.

The progenitor Kenneth Arrow was pretty wonkish even among economists. RCV appeals to technocrats, who like the provability of its assertions. It's also a change from tradition. People with these tendencies tend to skew left.

real technocrats know instant runoff is quite lousy. It's very unclear why this is the alternative that becomes so popular.

Why is it lousy on technocratic terms?

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