We had an IRV election(under the name "ranked choice voting") in SF. It had some problems:
1. Anecdotes of people thinking it was literally three votes, or people who only voted for the first round, still came up.
2. Voting was too tactical for most people's tastes; in the mayoral race a majority never appeared, thus there were ultimately 11 rounds of runoffs(with 12 candidates), yet you could only pick the top three; voting only for minority candidates left your vote out in the final rounds as they got eliminated.
3. The election still had historic-low turnout.
On the other hand, I still think the result showed a lot of promise.
It would be misleading to gloss over IRV's significant failings if we're talking about criteria failure.
* 8 people vote: A, C, B
* 5 people vote: B, C, A
* 4 people vote: C, B, A
IRV eliminates C, despite the majority of voters preferring C over B (12 to 5). The order of elimination means that significant secondary preferences are often ignored.
Liberians are eliminated (despite the majority of voters preferring them over the Democrats), and Democrats win.
Notice how when you use party names, it makes more sense? The Republican and Democrat voters are simply voting "anyone but the other major party". If they are neck-to-neck on primary votes, then the secondary votes of the minor parties start to be counted. This is a feature, not a bug.
I see your point here, but all voters in your mockup presented the Libertarians as their first or second choice. As a compromise candidate, that's not a bad option.
Further, I don't think real-world voting would match up exactly with the above. There are people that would vote R/D/L and D/R/L, both of which are lacking from this example that would swing things away from the Libertarians.
Sure, but you really should not underestimate how important it is that everyone understand how their vote is counted.
I had a roommate who worked for a voting reform nonprofit and he said even gathering signatures for "simple" IRV is quite challenging. It's just too hard to explain quickly.
Top 10 lists are not a novel concept for most people. Individual votes are precisely like that. Cumulatively, the person who did the best on everyone's lists wins. It's far simpler than the system we have now.
The plural of anecdote isn't evidence, I know, but: I had Condorcet voting briefly explained to me at a young age, and I grasped it immediately. I couldn't do the math, but it was conceptually really easy to grasp. I didn't fully understand the current US system until around age 20.
> I had Condorcet voting briefly explained to me at a young age, and I grasped it immediately.
Unfortunately, HN readers are not representative of the general population. It's not that complicated, no, but I can see people having a lot more trouble with understanding Concordet voting than with understanding IRV.
With Concordet voting, listing someone as your second choice can cause your first choice to lose, which would probably confuse a lot of people.