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.
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.