First objection. Why would the people in power change the voting system that got them in power? Well, the spoiler effect has cost both Dems & Reps a major election before. Getting rid of that glitch would be a win-win for major and minor parties!

This inference is completely defective. Of course a system has a cost, but the cost to a major party of changing to rcv is in many cases to completely hold decades-long strangleholds they previously had. It's like saying, uh, "Right now Hugh cooks his food, but that sometimes results in him burning himself, so of course he'd be glad to sign on to eating food raw!"

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 months ago

This is it right here, the Dems (and even the Reps!) sometimes allow RCV at small scale to make it look like there's even a chance of it at large scale, but materially will never allow it to happen.

[–] livingcoder@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago

The runoff voting downside is incorrect, the "drag the voters up to yellow and watch how it makes red win" example. This is not "see how making yellow more popular makes yellow lose". It's actually "see how making red more popular than yellow makes red win". The movement of the voters is not for yellow, but for red and yellow in a way that gives more voters to red.

There is no way for yellow to be the only candidate to get a boost of voters in the demo. If there were, it would only demonstrate further that yellow would still continue to win.

Runoff voting is the way.