You improve a broken system by fixing the broken system, not by pretending you’re not using it.
Vote, agitate or even run as a candidate that will pass ranked choice voting, locally or larger. Support the interstate electoral vote compact. Do whatever you can to directly fix the system.
Until then, you mitigate harm within the broken system.
Nobody is arguing that. The problem is presenting third parties as bad without giving any sort of context on how and where harm needs to be mitigated.
For instance: Alaska has ranked choice voting. Why on earth would you waste resources telling people to oppose third parties if you know some of the people you’re talking to live in alaska? It makes no sense. The problem here, as it has always been, is the voting system cannot handle 3rd parties and we should back away from them where spoiler effects are a concern
Contextually, we are discussing the presidential election. That’s what the meme above is about. 49 of 50 states are FPTP. Alaska is the only one using RCV. Since Alaska’s total population is 800k out of 345 million US citizens, the discussion of voting pragmatically for president affects 99.8% of Americans.
In Alaska, which does have RCV for president starting this year, people should fully vote for their ideal candidate, as long as they rank the rest as well so RCV works.
So overall, for every 500 Americans who read this thread and now opt to vote pragmatically, it might adversely affect 1 Alaskan, who may vote pragmatically instead of ideally. That’s not a perfect ideal for those rare Alaskans, but it’s still reasonable.
Right but if only a handful of swing states actually matter here so lets take it a step further, why waste effort telling people from like california or texas not to vote 3rd party because, lets be honest, the margins aren’t big enough for third parties to matter there.
Like I feel like its both more convincing and more honest to just say “Don’t vote third party where the spoiler effect is a concern” or “don’t vote third party in swing states”
