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Kaj_Sotala comments on Imperfect Voting Systems - Less Wrong
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I think people often dismiss systems like STV/IRV by essentially saying "Arrow's theorem implies you can still vote tactically, so it's just as bad". But there's a big difference: in STV it's much harder to figure out how to vote tactically.
In First Past The Post systems, tactical voting is blindingly obvious: if there are two candidates you like, but you don't think that your favourite has enough popularity to win outright, then you should vote for the other one, to avoid splitting the vote. This is easy to understand, and it's also easy to detect circumstances where it would be beneficial for you to vote other than your preferences.
OTOH, even though there are times where you can vote tactically in STV, they're harder to understand, and crucially, it's much harder to recognise such opportunities: you need a lot more information.
This means that, in general, STV would cut down on tactical voting a great deal, simply because it makes it harder.
This. In FPTP, tactical voting will have a major influence on the results, since it's so obvious and thus lots of people will end up doing it. In STV, most people won't even realize that the opportunity for tactical voting exists, so the amount of people doing it will be much smaller.
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Because in electoral politics, you are not a unique snowflake. Failure to take into account collective action of people thinking along the lines you're thinking drastically understates the influence of those thoughts.
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It's not that your decision affects the others. That's messed up causality. It's that your decision shares a lot of its causes with other decisions in other people. If you take yours as typical of a particular subset, and decide not to vote, then that suggests that others in that subset might as well. Gathering a large bloc of equivalent voters raises the voting power from approximately 0 to... well, some nontrivial number. If it's really large, it's exactly 1 (voting power is not probability, so 1 is a legit answer).
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It's not 'will be the same regardless of which side I come down on', like we're in a state
A |Luke votes & Joe votes> + B|Luke doesn't vote & Joe doesn't vote>
It's 'Is this a good plan of action? Let's look at its consequences. First order (if I do it): OK. Second order (if everyone does it): not OK.'
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