#2 - Election administrators hate IRV. They'll oppose, sabotage it at every turn. We had a local trial run. As an observer, it'd be hard to argue the admins made an honest effort to make it succeed.
#3 - IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents.
Any changes to our voting systems should be incremental, deliberate. First with local races and then progressively up ballot. Give people time to adapt.
But I agree 100% with your final point: people need time to adapt, and be willing to do so. Changing the system to something people trust even less would be bad.
This is a feature, not a bug. The count should be done by hand. The multiple rounds increase the probability that shennanigans will be detected, whether by sheer weight of watching eyes or by numerical irregularities between rounds.
> Election administrators hate IRV. They'll oppose, sabotage it at every turn.
I don't see how to predict which one they will like.
> IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents.
My parents are in their 70s and have voted this way since before I was born. My paternal grandparents were voting this way before my parents were born. My maternal grandparents voted this way when they moved to Australia.
Tens of millions of Australians vote this way and have done so for about a century.
It does not seem statistically likely that somehow Australia has had an uninterrupted run of particular genius at a multi-decadal/multi-million-person scale that nobody else in the world can replicate ever again.
My jurisdiction often has 30+ contests. We had 22 belligerents for mayor 2 years ago. I think we had 12 for senator in our most recent primary. I dimly recall my county counts 450k ballots.
Commonwealth, state and local elections are held separately.
How many candidates for hotly contested races?
For Senate elections it is not uncommon for there to be literally hundreds of names on the ballot, which is why "above the line voting" is an option.
How many ballots are procssed?
For a Commonwealth and State elections, millions, with an indicative count (ie, whether there a clear winner on first preferences) made on the same night by tallying across hundreds or thousands of polling stations.
More to the point: it scales. The indicative count is easily parallelised to any level, since summation is a commutative operation.
I think your implication is that Australia doesn't do it at a large enough scale and that therefore, our experiences don't count. That isn't true. Commonwealth elections are comparable in scale and complexity to the operations of those run by the largest states in the USA to handle federal elections.
If you're handling large scale, complicated IRV elections with ease, than that should inform the efforts of our local proponents (eg fairvote.org).
People seem to get fixed on ranked choice voting versus plurality voting (the current system), and what we really need is a movement to change the voting method to something more accurate.
But it's puzzling to me why the discussion seems to highlight ranking rather than approval voting. The only argument I've really heard against it is that people would get confused and not realize they can vote for more than one person. But it seems to me in that case you've just re-implemented plurality voting, and people would figure it out well enough. Just put out a big public ad campaign. People would learn.
Oakland switched their mayoral election to IRV (maybe ten years ago?) and it was so misunderstood that even one of the candidates recommended that his supporters vote for him in every IRV rank position! (Or perhaps he just didn't want to recommend his supporters even think about the other candidates names?)
How?
"Just vote one". Or "just mark one". Or "100 points for us and 0 for anyone else". Etc etc. Enough voters will comply -- especially in voluntary systems which magnify the power of fringe voters -- that any advantages of non-ranking voting schemes will be neutralised.
Voting systems like approval voting, range voting and so on work if the options or candidates are prepared to behave uprightly. Outside of situations like a local club or professional organisation, they won't. They will meta-game. It happened in Queensland when they introduced "optional preferential" voting.
* Vote for B and C. My vote for C is guarenteed to fail because I'm also giving a vote to B, which was likely to be better than them in the first place. There's no way C can win if everyone who votes for them also votes for B.
* Vote for C alone. This increases C's chance of beating B, but it means that if C doesn't win I now had no say in whether A or B won.
Politics isn't black and white. There isn't a set of candidates I'm ok with vs a set I am not. My preferences are a ranked list, and any system that doesn't let me express those preferences is, in my opinion, worse than IRV, even if it does produce some theoretically sub-optimal results in some weird edge cases.
EDIT:
> Maybe in practice people would only ever approve one candidate and the situation wouldn't change, but I think it's a least a good small step forward.
I didn't see that bit before. Yes sorry, if we're talking about in comparison to FPTP, I'm all for approval voting.
Really, we just need something better than first past the post.
FPTP < IRV < Kemeny–Young < Majority Judgment
Really, if anyone here hasn't looked at cardinal voting systems before, I strongly recommend reading some of the academic work in this area. There are a lot of strong considerations in favor that surprised me.
Because there is no consistent meaning to “approval”; this is generally a problem with limited-buckets systems in that they force artificially creating ties with no consistent meaning; if you have to have a single-winner system, it should be a ranked-ballot system without limited buckets that does something sensible with the rankings; IRV is about the worst, IMO, that meets that minimum standard.