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.

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.

… 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.

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.

I’m definitely bi, but Lemmy’s wash of trans / autistic / communist content leads to what-ifs.

It’s a fnord. A meaningless trigger for a conditioned fear response.

Fuck off.

Enough creators I follow are coming out as trans that I wonder if I’m missing something about myself. I don’t think it’s me… but if not, I sure can pick 'em.

Admittedly the rate among webcomic artists is through the fucking roof.

Thumbnail looks like a horny cacodemon.

Nonprofit gacha. That’s a new one.

Still no.

Most soaps wish they could be as melodramatic as the rugby baby scene.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

The difference between this abusive horseshit and any cheaper example is quantitative - not qualitative.

The entire business model is criminal.

Holy shit, Pete Stacker was having a day.

I would maybe not put thermal issues right in the name.

wd40

We are all such dorks.

Frankie Boyle has opinions.

Its reach exceeded its grasp. It’s waggly single-armed grasp.

That card launched the same year as Trespasser.

That said, apparently the technique was one of those comically early 1970s innovations, introduced by James Blinn himself. Shows what I know.

Corporations need their shit slapped straight, on the topic of media ownership. If you want control over something - don’t sell it to ten million strangers.