It certainly helps to reframe the argument.
If you are town, and you have 1 townread, and you exclude yourself. Your chance of voting out mafia in 2 eliminations is greater than 50%.
To argue that the day 1 elimination is completely random is likely incorrect. I challenge people to be able to have 1 townread rather than defaulting to a no-elimination.
If you have a slight scumlean, you should be voting for them instead of voting to not eliminate. 2 eliminations is
not
worse than 1. Eliminations are the towns tool, mafia use the night kills. When have you ever played a game of mafia as town and tried to eliminate as few times as possible?
I pointed out that mafia have the option of forcing the same situation where there's 4 players alive whether we no eliminate today or not. So the only argument left is that we will somehow have more information later, but we can't get information later if we no eliminate. And the information we get later is worth more when there are less players alive, anyways.