Instant-runoff voting: Difference between revisions

The simplest way to modify IRV to address many of the issues IRV opponents have without changing IRV fundamentally is to allow voters to approve candidates (using an [[Approval threshold|approval threshold]]). If there are any majority-approved candidates, elect the most-approved of them, otherwise run IRV. Even if voters [[Favorite Betrayal|Favorite Betray]], they can still approve their honest favorite, giving their that candidate a chance to still win. In addition, this allows voters to better avert the [[Center squeeze effect|center squeeze effect]]. The standard argument made by IRV advocates against [[Approval voting]], that it fails [[later-no-harm]], has little to no relevance withto this modification, since voters seeking to avoid hurting their favorite candidates' chances of winning in the approval round can simply refrain from approving anyone, forcing the election to run under IRV rules.

Though IRV is often praised for passing [[later-no-harm]], which is claimed to encourage voters to rank all of their preferences, it doesn't tend to use as much of the information provided by the voters as other ranked methods, such as [[Condorcet methods]]. This is a less extreme analog to how [[First Past the Post electoral system|first past the post]] technically passes [[later-no-harm]] by ignoring later preferences altogether. So IRV's [[later-no-harm]] compliance has to be evaluated in context of the other criteria it fails due to using less information than other methods - that is, there may be ambiguity to how much IRV is truly protecting a voter's interests by not using their later-preference information at all.