[EM] Learning from IRV's success

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Jameson Quinn wrote:
> Russ's message about simplicity is well-taken. But the most successful 
> voting reform is IRV - which is far from being the simplest reform. Why 
> has IRV been successful?
> 
> I want to leave this as an open question for others before I try to 
> answer it myself. The one answer which wouldn't be useful would be 
> "Because CVD (now FairVote) was looking for a single-winner version of 
> STV". There's a bit of truth there, but it's a long way from the whole 
> truth, and we want to find lessons we can learn from moving forward, not 
> useless historical accidents.

I think there's that -- and the general confusion between ranked 
balloting in general and IRV in particular. FV has kept the two linked 
together, in effect giving a depiction of the sort: "Hey, don't you just 
loathe spoilers? Wouldn't it be better if you could rank the candidates 
so that there are no spoilers? Well, with IRV, you can!".

This seemed sensible enough at first glance, so IRV was accepted. It was 
a dangerous move: it could get IRV into elections more quickly, but if 
the voters found out that IRV provided bad results, they could turn 
against ranked ballots in general.

Also, I think IRV's seemingly intuitive nature has something to do with 
it. For those who *did* investigate more deeply, IRV seemed sensible, 
too: instead of holding a bunch of expensive runoffs, collect all the 
required information at once and then act as if there were runoffs. That 
fails to account for the dynamics between the rounds, but that's a 
subtle detail and might easily be missed.