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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   4409 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win.

Presuming they preference republicans ahead of dems, what is the assumed mechanism for this?

In 55% R districts where democrats select D as their top choice?

That shouldn't matter, even if you have e.g. 45% D, 30% R, 15% L, 10% C in first preferences, minor parties get eliminated first and their votes are added to the R tally.

The failure mode of IRV looks more like 45% D, 10% R, 25% L, 20% C where the Rs are the voters sufficiently disengaged and ignoring third parties to not put down a second choice or write D as a second choice.

In other words, if almost everyone selects different obscure third-parties they really want first and the realistic choice second, then IRV gets nonsense results because the realistic choice gets eliminated even though everyone expected their votes to get reallocated to them. In practice this isn't a real problem because no one proposing IRV seriously expects any meaningful votes outside of the two-party duopoly.

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