jimmysnyder said:
This is neither criticism nor praise, but I merely point out the intersting fact that under this system, the winner need not be anyone's first choice, but merely everyone's second. Or not even second, but only third.
True, although the same criticism applies to our present system. At least with instant runoff voting you get to say who your first-choice candidate is, even if your third-choice candidate is the one who ends up winning. With winner-take all voting, you're forced to shelve your opinions and just vote for the third-choice candidate directly out of political expediency. So I'm not sure we'd be giving anything up in this department. When was the last time that your first-choice candidate in the early primary process ended up winning?
jimmysnyder said:
What happens if candidate A has the smallest number of first choices and so loses those votes. Then it turns out that A is third choice enough to make 50%, but only if you add back in the votes that you eliminated in the first step? This is more complicated than grandma's underwear.
In the standard methods for doing instant run-off voting, that candidate simply loses after the first round. I'm not sure whether this is really a problem or not, though. I'm trying to think through some examples to see if it results in problems... you need at least 4 candidates for such an example to be interesting, cause if there's only 3, getting a majority of third-choice votes basically means that everyone agrees that they do not want you to win, and so it's right that you should be eliminated at the outset. With 4 or more candidates, maybe you can construct a more interesting example? At any rate, there are numerous variants on instant-runoff voting, some of which presumably address cases like this.
This brings up the interesting issue of how the interpretations of the votes change as you go down through the levels of preference. Clearly, a first-choice vote is essentially the same as a regular vote in our present system, and a second-choice one is also similar. But as you get down to the n-th choice vote on a ballot of n candidates, it starts to look more like a vote against that candidate than a weak vote for him.
Another ramification to think through is the effect of such a system on party primaries. I.e., it removes much of the incentive to even hold party primaries, as there is no danger of splitting the vote and so losing to the opposing party. This is one of the key ways in which instant-runoff voting breaks the hold of parties. In addition to providing breathing space for third parties to make inroads, it also creates an incentive for the bigger parties to be more big-tent and less disciplined. In winner-take-all voting, elections are a zero-sum game, where less votes for one party is equivalent to more votes for the other one. This is not the case with instant-runoff voting, which would allow, for example, libertarians to vote their conscience without the fear that they'll simply end up empowering Democrats by doing so.