> if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same Certainly not! In Burlington, people know the Republica

> if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same Certainly not! In Burlington, people know the Republican can't win. So, like everyone in the current system, people would (and have both before and since IRV) vote strategically. So, the less-hardcore Republicans would vote Democrat in order to stop the Progressive. In fact, if IRV had not been repealed, a good portion of the Republicans would betray their favorite and vote Dem as 1st choice (dishonestly) in the future in order to stop the Progressive from ever winning again. Furthermore, when vote splitting happens in a current system, everyone readily gets why it was "wrong" and they adapt their strategies accordingly. > What does it mean to give them one more star? It means they are one more point ahead of the others. > One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd The weight is relative, that's all that matters. As long as people understand the system, they can realize that they are throwing away part of their vote if they only put a 1-star and nothing else. Four people who put 1-star for candidate A might have put 5 stars for candidate B. They are influencing the race just as much as anyone else. Here's what it means to be equal: Any voter can score the opposite of another voter and they will cancel out. Our votes can have equal weight if that's possible. That's not always possible in our current system or with IRV. > An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews. If there were 110 voters, then every item is relative to that vote. There's 100 1-star votes for candidate A and 10 5-star votes for candidate B? That means candidate B got zeros (blanks are no points) from 100 candidates. A candidate with 100 zero-star votes and only 10 5-star votes is a worse option.