This is a good part of why I've never really supported any rank system… to be clear, I've always realized that some are better than others, but the idea that multiple approaches can be used to interpret the same ballot, e.g. IRV vs Ranked Pairs vs Borda seems to me to be a flaw in the ballot itself. The key thing is that it should be as clear as possible from the simple ballot how the vote will get counted.
Systems where voters know with total clarity and certainty exactly how their vote is counted
Plurality/FPTP
Approval
Score
Systems where voters need to grasp the rules but can understand easily enough and then know for sure what their vote means
Score Runoff
Ranked Pairs
Systems where voters must understand the rules and even still do not really know when or whether their ballots will get fully counted
IRV
In other words, as a voter, with approval voting and score voting you simply know "giving candidate X 4 points gives them 4 points relative to whatever I score anyone else" and that holds true. Score Runoff is mostly that way, although the Runoff stage is a tad quirky but can be understood easily enough. With Ranked Pairs, you can say "I know that my preference of B over C will get counted in the system running through all the pairings".
But with IRV, nope. Voters cannot realistically understand whether their 2nd-choice votes will ever count and if so in what way. Either they know that this is totally unclear, or, worse, they think their votes will count (trust that the system is churning out a result that considers their rankings) but they are wrong.
I.e. IRV is uniquely bad in deceiving voters. For me, this core issue of voters-know-what-their-vote-does (not in terms of complex results of splitting, just in the basic sense of they know correctly how the system uses their ballot) is a huge issue. I think it's part of why IRV may not even be better than plurality.
So, maybe this issue can be added to the site in some appropriate place.
This is a good part of why I've never really supported any rank system… to be clear, I've always realized that some are better than others, but the idea that multiple approaches can be used to interpret the same ballot, e.g. IRV vs Ranked Pairs vs Borda seems to me to be a flaw in the ballot itself. The key thing is that it should be as clear as possible from the simple ballot how the vote will get counted.
Systems where voters know with total clarity and certainty exactly how their vote is counted
Systems where voters need to grasp the rules but can understand easily enough and then know for sure what their vote means
Systems where voters must understand the rules and even still do not really know when or whether their ballots will get fully counted
In other words, as a voter, with approval voting and score voting you simply know "giving candidate X 4 points gives them 4 points relative to whatever I score anyone else" and that holds true. Score Runoff is mostly that way, although the Runoff stage is a tad quirky but can be understood easily enough. With Ranked Pairs, you can say "I know that my preference of B over C will get counted in the system running through all the pairings".
But with IRV, nope. Voters cannot realistically understand whether their 2nd-choice votes will ever count and if so in what way. Either they know that this is totally unclear, or, worse, they think their votes will count (trust that the system is churning out a result that considers their rankings) but they are wrong.
I.e. IRV is uniquely bad in deceiving voters. For me, this core issue of voters-know-what-their-vote-does (not in terms of complex results of splitting, just in the basic sense of they know correctly how the system uses their ballot) is a huge issue. I think it's part of why IRV may not even be better than plurality.
So, maybe this issue can be added to the site in some appropriate place.