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.
IRV does not have momentum, but dissatisfaction with voting systems does,
Third parties, once educated, will support RV but not IRV and not
approval and not Condorcet.
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:
"Global cooling sounds like a great idea, but we need to unify behind global warming,
because it has all the momentum!" Well, no.
"Yes, we made a mistake going to war, but we'll look stupid if we admit that, so
we have to keep pretending it was a great idea." Yes, we can see
it is important (especially to you)
not to look stupid, but coming to the right decisions and hence having the right
perceptions about wars are more important.