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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

There's a big unaddressed obstacle to IRV which is that it's a little confusing and complicated to explain. This is a much bigger problem than it might first sound like. It is an absolute requirement of any voting system that voters understand how it works and feel confident in it.

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This is deeply unfortunate if it's really true, because the prime factor in favor of IRV is that it is the second-easiest system to explain after FPTP.

But it's harder to understand consequences, which change over time. So the explanation is deceptively simple. Like the game of life. Random Ballot is simple to explain and is a lottery pool. Simpler than IRV.

Random ballot only works for races like the house though. It doesn't work at all for Presidential or Senate elections.

Random ballot works just as well for Senate elections, and votes for Presidential electors (or even votes by Presidential electors) as it does for House votes.

Which is, to be sure, not very well, but there's nothing special about the House that makes it work there better.

IRV is nowhere near the second easiest to explain.

Approval voting: you can vote for any of the candidates you like, not just one.

Way simpler than IRV.

Score voting: give any or all candidates scores.

Easy explanation.

STAR: score the candidates, there's an auto-runoff where the two highest-score candidates get checked to see which is preferred by more voters.

At least as easy to explain as IRV, and much easier to actually understand overall, particularly in making sense of the results and following what happened.

IRV: Rank the candidates by your preference, 1st to N'th. Your vote is applied to each candidate in turn, until one wins majority (50% + 1).

There -- simple!

Well, simple because it avoids explaining a lot with “in turn”.

>N'th >in turn >50% + 1

Way too complicated for 50% + 1 of the population

Your vote is NOT applied to each candidate in turn. That happens to SOME voters sometimes. But you can also have your 1st choice eliminated after your 2nd choice, and then your 2nd choice is NEVER counted.

IRV is strictly less simple (both to explain and to implement) than Bucklin (or Majority Judgement), since Bucklin is IRV without loser elimination, and MJ is (or can be implemented as) Bucklin with ties allowed.

No, that would be party-list proportional representation.

I might've said the same 10+ years ago, but now?

IRV (and any preferential voting system) is quite close to the voting system for any of the weekly elimination talent shows. You rank people in order, the last one gets knocked out, you try again - with the difference that this all happens at once.

Are we really saying that people are too dim to rank their choices in order of preference, or understand the voting system behind some of the most popular TV formats worldwide for the past decade?

Maine has put a whole lot of effort into making our RCV based ballot understandable, including providing this sample that clearly outlines how it works and several options:

https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/MarkedBallotExam...

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