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No it is not "very easy". IRV is not summable, so a two-way communication is needed between every round. The San Francisco city elections page once explained th
by ClayShentrup 7y ago
No it is not "very easy". IRV is not summable, so a two-way communication is needed between every round. The San Francisco city elections page once explained this as follows: “Due to the requirement that all ballots must be centrally tallied in City Hall and not at the polling places, the Department of Elections has not set a date for releasing any preliminary results using the ranked-choice voting method.”
So you either have the communication between every round (which is essentially re-counting) or you physically take all the ballots to a central counting location, which introduces delays and chain of custody issue.
Also, IRV leads to more spoiled ballots.
http://scorevoting.net/SPRates.html http://scorevoting.net/SPRates.html
So while there are more important reasons to prefer Score Voting and Approval Voting (better outcomes, better resistance to strategy, etc.), complexity is certainly not a non-issue.
- jacques_chester 7y agoFirst preferences are summable and it is usually clear, on the night of the election, who has won the majority in Parliament. This is called the "indicative count". As for chain of custody, again, Australia has solved this problem. Every box is numbered, every seal on the box is numbered. All of them are signed out by electoral officials, witnessed by at least two scrutineers from different candidates. When the boxes are opened this process is repeated. Do you know how many times ballot boxes have gone missing in an Australian election? Once. In a century. Once. For which the High Court voided the election because there was a minute but non-zero chance that the outcome would've been affected. It was re-run from scratch.