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I would make the stronger claim that IRV is an even worse voting system than the one we already have. At least with FPTP voters can easily figure out the effect
by xvedejas 8y ago
I would make the stronger claim that IRV is an even worse voting system than the one we already have. At least with FPTP voters can easily figure out the effect of their vote. With IRV it can be ridiculously hard to interpret, and relies on a lot of strategic thinking like "well, I think candidate A isn't great and so will not have enough support to make it to the later rounds, so I might as well rank A first so that maybe they can eliminate someone else I don't like before they get eliminated and then my vote gets transferred to my actual top choice... oops too many people did this and now candidate A won"
- nostrademons 8y agoThis could also be viewed as a feature rather than a bug. Make it complex enough and maybe people will fall back to "Vote for the candidates you want to see win, in order of preference, and quit worrying about how everybody else is voting", which is how elections are supposed to work. There's an impossibility theorem (Gibbard's) that states that for any non-dictatorial process for choosing among > 2 outcomes, there is no way to avoid tactical voting potentially swaying the results. The next-best alternative might be to make tactical voting so complex and error-prone that nobody bothers.
- xvedejas 8y agoI worry that this provides a very strong tool for people to make arguments that "ranked voting systems don't work, since you're always confused by their results" and have a strong case to bring everyone back to FPTP.