Behold, my anti-IRV copypasta:

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Ranked choice AKA instant runoff voting AKA the arrogantly branded “the alternative vote” is not a good thing.

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Changing your ranking for a candidate to a higher one can hurt that candidate. Changing to a lower ranking can help that candidate. IRV fails the monotonicity criterion.

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Changing from not voting at all to voting for your favorite candidates can hurt those candidates, causing your least favorite to win. IRV fails the participation criterion.

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If candidate A is beating candidate B, adding some candidate C can cause B to win. IRV fails the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion. In other words, it does not eliminate the spoiler effect.

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There are strategic incentives to vote dishonestly.

Due to the way it works, it does not and has not helped third parties.

Votes cannot be processed locally; Auditing is a nightmare.

Et cetera.

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If you want a very good and simple single winner election, look to approval voting.

If you’re interested in making that even better in some ways, look to a modification called delegable yes/no voting.

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Enacting IRV is a way to fake meaningful voting reform, and build change fatigue, so that folks won’t want to change the system yet again.

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How can a change from not voting at all, to voting for favored candidates, hurt those candidates?

Participation Criterion Failure

Wikipedia offers a simple example of IRV violating the participation criterion, like this:

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2 voters are unsure whether to vote. 13 voters definitely vote, as follows:

• 6 rank C, A, B
• 4 rank B, C, A
• 3 rank A, B, C

If the 2 unsure voters don’t vote, then B wins.

A is eliminated first in this case, for having the fewest top-rank ballots.

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The unsure voters both would rank A, B, C.

If they do vote, then B gets eliminated first, and C wins.

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By voting, those unsure voters changed the winner from their second choice to their last choice, due to the elimination method which is not as rational as first appears.

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How can raising your ranking for a candidate hurt that candidate?

Monotonicity Criterion Failure

Wikipedia offers a less simple example of IRV violating the monotonicity criterion:

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100 voters go to the booths planning to rank as follows:

• 30 rank A, B, C
• 28 rank C, B, A
• 16 rank B, A, C
• 16 rank B, C, A
• 5 rank A, C, B
• 5 rank C, A, B

If this happens, B gets eliminated, and A wins.

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While in line, 2 folks who planned to rank C, A, B realize they actually prefer A. They move A to the top: A, C, B.

Now C gets eliminated, and B wins.

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By promoting A from second to first choice, those 2 voters changed the winner from A, their favorite, to B, their least favorite.

A twitter mutual and I had this whole discussion because she values the Condorcet criterion and I thought the later no harm principle was more important. I still feel like instant run off voting makes the most intuitive sense, though I’m aware of the examples where it does something suboptimal… can’t help feeling like those constructed sets of preferences don’t correspond to the real world.

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