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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

There are more places than Burlington where RCV has been used.

Burlington is unusual in that third party candidates are already competitive in Vermont, which means the spoiler effect was more visible from the outset. As RCV proponents continue to incorrectly imply that RCV eliminates the spoiler effect, I expect we’ll see more third party candidates running in other locations and spoiling more elections, leading to an increase in backlash against RCV in the future.

It works in some places but not others. This shouldn't be surprising; the math works the same everywhere but the perception of fairness is a social and cultural phenomenon.

Australia didn't inherit RCV from the UK. It wasn't present among the convicts. It doesn't magically come from the water supply. It was introduced to replace FPTP.

Again: Americans are not a different sort of human from Australians.

The problem is that losers are muddying the waters, not that the water was undrinkable by American minds.

> Again: Americans are not a different sort of human from Australians.

I'm not talking about biology, I'm talking about culture. I thought I made that clear, and I'm sure you understand the distinction.

You're nitpicking rhetorical flair instead of refuting the point.

My point is that a voting system being accepted by the Australian public doesn't prove that it would be accepted by the American public, because there are cultural differences between the countries.

No denying there are many cultural differences between Australia and the US, but I think the key difference here is not cultural, rather political history.

In the contemporary US, the strongest opposition to RCV comes from the political right.

In Australia, RCV (or "preferential voting" as we call it) was originally introduced because – at the time – it was viewed as politically beneficial to the right. The 1918 Swan by-election (what Americans would call a "special election") was won by the centre-left Labor Party, despite only receiving a minority of the vote – because the centre-right had split into two separate parties, one with a predominantly urban base (businesspeople, professionals, etc), the other with a predominantly rural base (farmers). The conservative government introduced RCV to reduce the political advantage the centre-left had obtained through greater unity.

So, maybe what RCV really needs to succeed in the US, is a split in the GOP (Trumpists vs anti-Trumpists?), so it becomes in the political self-interest of conservatives to support it.

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