Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Range voting: Decide how much you like each candidate vis a vis all the other ones.

You have it completely backward. People rate items like faces or movies all the time, without relating them directly to other options. A movie is thought of as a "five" if it was about average, or a 10 if it was just absolutely superb and classic, or an 8 if it was really good, etc.

But now in order to "pick your favorite" you, BY DEFINITION, have to compare every single option with every single other one. Sure, IRV sounds simpler when you completely distort reality.

Worry about the balancing effect of other people's votes.

You have to do the same thing with IRV, so that's a poor argument. And with IRV, using strategy effectively equates to the same strategy as with plurality voting, causing much worse results. Range Voting, on the other hand, handles strategy gracefully. It produces greater social utility efficiency under completely strategic electorates than IRV often produces under completely honest electorates.

This doesn't come up in IRV, since second preferences have no effect unless your first preference has been eliminated, so there's no need for strategic voting.

False. This has to be the biggest single myth (I would probably say "lie", since we've corrected them on it, but they still say it) perpetuated by IRV advocates like FairVote.org. See this example:

#voters their vote
20 McCain > Gore > Dean
10 Gore > McCain > Dean
29 Dean > Gore > McCain

With IRV, Gore is eliminated, and McCain beats Dean, 30-29. But what if 10 people in the third group strategically "betray" their sincere favorite, Dean, andmove him to last place:

#voters their vote
20 McCain > Gore > Dean
20 Gore > McCain > Dean
19 Dean > Gore > McCain

Now Gore wins, which is better for those strategic betrayers.

With Range Voting, there is never an incentive not to give a maximum score to your favorite candidate however. The strategies in Range Voting are much less problematic.

And no, this isn't a contrived example - this type of scenario happens around 20% of the time.