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Comment by lesuorac | Hacker News Reader

You should never need to pick between just two candidates though.

The need for any sort of alternative system to first-past-the-post should've been plainly obvious in the '00 election. The problem is the people that could change that were elected under a first-past-the-post system and don't want to lose their current advantage.

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Sadly, the biggest group pushing for an alternative is FairVote, who exclusively push RCV/IRV, which doesn't fix most of the issues of FPTP and introduces new ones. I'm bombarded by their ads, where they outright lie about its properties ("RCV ends the spoiler effect", "RCV means no more voting for the lesser evil").

What doesn't RCV fix about FPTP? And what issues does it introduce?

I've seen discussions around how it can be more confusing than the current system, and can reduce confidence in the election.

It doesn't fix the spoiler effect (it makes its own version of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze ), and it removes monotonicity. The second one is a big deal for me, at least in FPTP a vote for a candidate always helps them. With RCV, a vote for a candidate can hurt them, and sometimes not voting makes the outcome you want more likely than if you did vote for it.

The 2022 Alaska election was a great example of it failing: https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22/ FairVote called that election a success because people managed to fill in their ballots, even if they didn't get the outcome they thought they were voting for.

Very interesting graphics.

Definitely changed my mind over RCV vs STAR. Although I'll still support either if I had the opportunity.

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