4 ms·

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

• MichaelCollins 4y ago
  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.
  • skissane 4y ago
    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.