Q. OK, OK, I concede IRV is a worse voting system than Range Voting, but it has the Reform-Momentum right now. So you by promoting range voting are doing us all a disservice and being tactically unwise by splitting voting-reform forces.

A. (Executive summary) Exactly wrong.

  1. IRV does not have momentum, but dissatisfaction with voting systems does,
  2. Third parties, once educated, will support RV but not IRV and not approval and not Condorcet.
  3. Democrats & Republicans will, once educated, support RV in primaries – but not IRV and not approval and definitely not 2-round plurality+runoffs (they hate those).

Therefore the right course is to support range voting and to educate these people. The wrong course is to pretend IRV is the salvation of third parties (actually, it leads to 2-party domination), and to pretend IRV is simpler or leads to better election winners (actually it leads to worse ones than range voting on average as has been shown by numerous computer simulation studies). Taking the wrong course will waste time and ultimately backfire.

Analogies:

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