Kevin Venzke wrote:
The Burlington votes are inspiring. I'm amazed at how close the
first preference counts were, and that a fourth candidate even got
15%. Unfortunately the resolution is so stereotypical you could
think it was contrived to make a point.
What worries me is the possibility that every time we succeed in
implementing an election method which can handle any number of
candidates that we throw at it, we will mostly see scenarios with
one or two strong candidates and a half-dozen losers that never
coalesced into anything, so that we mostly will not be able to tell
the difference in effect from just using FPP.
Even if the method would only produce one or two strong candidates, I'd
imagine the information provided by the rank ballot input or by the
outcome social ordering could be used by the "losers" to find out how to
adjust their positions to have a better chance of winning.
Even in an FPTP two-party state, a new party may displace one of the old
parties, such as with the Whig Party being displaced by the Republican
Party. In FPTP, this is rare, though, because even if voters want to
change parties, they have to consider the problem of the lesser of two
evils. A better election method (such as a Condorcet method) would let
the voters change parties more gradually, and so, such party shifts
could happen more often (and the established parties would have to take
that into consideration).
A greater problem would be if voters (or parties) would "mostly not be
able to tell the difference", they could say "eh, why bother with this
technological mess when it doesn't make a difference anyway?", and
revert to FPTP. Then the subtle dynamics would never have a chance to
come into being.
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