[1] https://fairvote.org/defining-the-spoiler-effect/ [2] https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/instant-runoff-voting
I’m curious about what other people think of this. I was once of the opinion that ranked choice voting (in the states that passed this reform) would lead to a renaissance in the viability of third parties there, but it hasn’t come to fruition. It led me to think that many Americans are actually content with having two parties.
A lot of people also end up running with no affiliation (for instance, for very local offices). They might align with some additional party in an ideological sense, but there probably isn't even a local organization to coordinate with.
What do you think about keeping the electoral college and use IRV instead?
I think the electoral college is working as intended to balance out power between larger more powerful states and less powerful states. Though I also don’t believe the popular vote is necessarily ideal from the perspective of maintaining more diversity of thoughts and opinions which is useful for a healthy republic.
As someone who’s lived in mostly rural states I’m glad because it prevents places like California with large populations with pretty homogeneous opinions and world views to dominate the nations elections. I get folks in those larger states would also feel equally left out as well.
I view the electoral college as a means of accounting for the “entropy” of votes among states. There’s more diversity of thought and opinion between say a rural Wyoming farmer and a worker in Hawaii than there is among most Californians living in say the 50 square miles of Hollywood.
In a fashion it’s similar to how network effects dominate large in markets where companies lucky to get a market first or to grow first get an unfair network advantage. Antitrust and tax laws ideally gently balance out this winner-takes-effects to provide more diverse and robust markets. Most hyper successful companies aren’t necessarily better at what they do and there’s a large amount of luck in success. Of course they still have to work hard and be effective to capitalize on the opportunities. Similar things happen among states in the USA.
While I often hear “land doesn’t vote”, people don’t consider that a farm will never have the same economic output as an office building with the same footprint. This includes the population that comes with all that employment. There needs to be a way to represent the less economically dense sectors of the country because otherwise cities will dominate everything.
That office building might have more economic outpiut, but at the end of the day it's the farm that feeds people and mines that provide materials to build the offices. We can do without Meta or Google, but without farms people start starving and revolting pretty quickly.
And cities don't want to be governed by the outsized importance of small population states (Wyoming)