this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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The Marxist-Leninists won despite 2 other parties competing, for anyone unaware.
And what do you think happens next?
Those two parties won't keep slapfighting for an uneven split of 60% of the vote, while this third party takes power with 40% of the vote. They will merge. Or the smaller one will simply vanish, if its voters prefer the bigger loser to the plurality winner.
Even in the US, where plurality has a hideous repeated bottleneck on which two parties can meaningfully exist, we did not always have these two parties.
... wait, Sri Lanka has ranked ballots! What the fuck? They're not even using Plurality, they're doing RCV!
Ranked Choice is a hot mess on its own, but-- oh for fuck's sake I'll just use the example I always use. Say an election goes like this:
40% vote A > B > C.
35% vote C > B > A.
25% vote B > C > A.
Plurality says A wins, because Plurality sucks. You don't even need a bare majority. You just need everybody else to split up.
RCV says C wins: B has the fewest top votes, so they're eliminated. The race becomes 40% A > C versus 60% C > A. Better... but still wrong, because 65% of people would prefer B > C.
Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs get that right. They model every runoff: A vs B is 40-60, A vs C is 40-60, B vs C is 65-35. B wins every 1v1 and is obviously the best candidate according to these voters. The supermajority prefers B.
And of course Approval Voting is just letting people check multiple names, and it somehow matches Condorcet results when enough people vote, because you are unique, just like everybody else. Genuinely there is no good reason we're not doing Approval by default.
In theory, yes, but so few (~2%) people use it that in practice it is first past the post.
Good politics.
Is there something I’m missing? They won because they got the most votes between three parties(but not a majority) and then the most again during the second round of voting between the top two. They won both times.
Ideologies aside your comment is written like you suspect foul play or something. “It’s broken because they could never win if there was competition” is just a terrible take so I assume I must be interpretting it wrong, right?
The new guy won despite winning <5% of votes in the last election. If people vote for the candidate they like instead of trying to game the system by calculating who they'd rather not win the most, then maybe we can kick out corrupt incumbents and get in fresh faces (they'll get corrupted over time too, at which point you rinse and repeat).
By the sound of things it's more like nobody wanted anything to do with the major-party incumbent. Duverger's law is about how there tend to be two parties. Three and one are equally unstable. When a race becomes a total rout, like a 30-point spread, that dominance can be seen as a power vacuum.
... also, Sri Lanka has ranked ballots. It's not a Plurality voting system. They have an automatic runoff. That's one of the more obvious fixes that allows people to even consider supporting a third party, without playing Russian roulette against their own foot.
Emphasis on the 'tends'. It's a probabilistic observation, not a law of nature. Treating it as the latter leads to people acting against their best interests.
You are right, in theory, but please check how many additional votes the winner (or the runner-up) got as second-prefrence votes. It was around 2% of their totals. This is because in practice, most voyers didn't bother putting second and third preferences.
People acting in their best interests is how it happens. It's an electorate avoiding splits. Given the system you're voting under - you should vote for someone who has a chance of winning. Otherwise you might write-in some special favorite candidate that no other human being cares about, and accomplish literally nothing. Voting for a third party with single-digit support is not much better.
People voting against their own interests would be... not bothering to write in a second preference. It is the same fuckup: someone who cannot imagine their very favorite guy losing.
The problem is that who 'has a chance of winning' is decided by who people vote for.
Uh, that's what the Sri Lankan voters just did? The winner this time had 3% of the vote-share in the last election.
Oh yea for sure, that I’m behind 100%. “Strategic voting” is just silencing your one chance to have a real voice based on whoever’s PR team is doing better.
Didn't that happen in France in 2017? A party got founded and won.
That happens sometimes even in first-past-the-post systems.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist, it's a good thing.
I just read it as supporting third parties. I thought you were going to mention what happens if a third party were to get more votes but not a majority. I actually don't know. Would there still be a runoff between Dem and Rep or would the third party actually win it? I'd assume theres some rule that the third party has to win a majority or some bs