One of the most critical priority for any democracy is to improve its electoral system and start using a much better voting method.
Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) — marketed in the United States as Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) — is a single-winner voting method in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their supporters' ballots are redistributed to whoever those voters ranked next. The process repeats until one candidate accumulates a majority of the ballots still in play.
The intuitive appeal is real: voters can express a preference order rather than a single choice. A voter who prefers a third-party candidate can rank them first without fearing that their ballot will be "wasted." The vote transfers to their second choice if the first-choice candidate is eliminated. That is the promise.
The problem is that the promise is not fully kept — while simpler methods exist that deliver much better results.
IRV's central claim is that it ends the spoiler effect: the scenario where a third candidate splits the vote and causes the least-preferred candidate to win. In practice, this guarantee is weaker than advertised.
IRV evaluates candidates through a sequence of eliminations. The order in which candidates are eliminated matters enormously. A strong consensus candidate — broadly acceptable, rarely anyone's first choice — can be knocked out early because their first-choice vote share is modest, even if they would have won a head-to-head matchup against every other candidate. The technically correct term for the candidate who would beat everyone else in a one-on-one comparison is the Condorcet winner. IRV does not guarantee the Condorcet winner wins. This is not a theoretical edge case. It has happened.
The elimination sequence creates a systematic bias against moderate candidates. A candidate positioned at the centre of the political spectrum — preferred by many voters but few voters' first choice — is structurally disadvantaged. Candidates at the ideological poles mobilise intense first-choice support and survive the early rounds. The consensus candidate is eliminated before the transfers that would have elected them occur.
Under Approval Voting or Score Voting, the candidate with the broadest support wins, regardless of whether that support is "first choice" or "strong approval." There is no elimination sequence to produce this distortion.
IRV can produce outcomes that violate basic intuitions about fairness:
Approval Voting and Score Voting satisfy monotonicity — more support always helps — and avoid all three paradoxes.
IRV cannot be counted at the polling station. All ballots must be gathered in one place before the elimination rounds can begin, because each round depends on the complete distribution of ballots across all candidates. This is not a minor logistical inconvenience — it is a structural transparency problem. Voters and observers cannot watch their local count produce a result; the outcome emerges from a centralised computation that most voters cannot follow.
Approval and score voting are summed precinct by precinct, exactly like plurality voting. The numbers from each polling station are added together. Any voter can verify the arithmetic. The transparency IRV sacrifices is not recovered by any fairness gain.
The countries with the longest experience of IRV offer a sobering lesson. Australia has used preferential voting for the House of Representatives since 1918 — over a century. The result: two major political forces (Labor and the Liberal-National coalition) continue to dominate. Third parties and independents win seats primarily through the Senate, which uses a different, proportional system. The IRV House has not produced the multi-party flourishing that reformers promise.
The reason is structural. IRV reduces the penalty for voting sincerely in safe seats, but in competitive seats it reproduces the same strategic pressure as plurality voting. Voters in marginal constituencies still face the calculation: "Can my preferred candidate win here, or will I waste my vote?" The answer, in most marginal seats, remains: "Vote for one of the two front-runners." IRV bends the cage; it does not open it.
The most consequential problem with IRV may be the one reformers least anticipate: it leads nowhere better, and getting out of it costs as much as getting into it.
The ranking logic underlying IRV is fundamentally different from the scoring logic underlying Approval Voting, Score Voting, and Informed Score Voting. The two paradigms do not evolve into each other. A country that adopts IRV and later concludes that score-based methods are superior faces a complete overhaul — new ballot design, new counting infrastructure, new voter education, a new mental model. The transition from IRV to Approval Voting is just as institutionally demanding as the transition from plurality to IRV in the first place.
This matters because the alternative — going directly from plurality to Approval Voting — is the easiest major electoral reform available: the same ballot paper, the same counting procedure, the same districts, with one instruction changed from "pick one" to "pick all you approve of." A country on plurality voting can reach Approval Voting in a single easy step. A country that adopts IRV instead has spent real political capital on a hard transition, arrived at a system with serious structural flaws, and now faces another hard transition to reach where it should have gone directly.
IRV does not move a country toward genuine electoral reform. It moves it sideways — into a dead end from which the exit is expensive.
In a Vermont city mayoral election, three serious candidates competed under IRV. The candidate who would have beaten every other candidate head-to-head — the genuine consensus choice of the electorate — was eliminated in the early rounds because his first-choice vote share was modest. A more polarising candidate won. The city subsequently repealed IRV.
This repeal is analytically important. It did not occur because a partisan political machine mobilised against electoral reform. It occurred because voters who had chosen IRV experienced its paradox first-hand and decided the method did not deliver what they had been promised. The repeal came from IRV's own supporters — from one of the most progressive electorates in the United States. That is IRV's most honest verdict.
Australia adopted preferential voting in 1918 — not as a principled democratic improvement but as a solution to a specific coordination problem for the conservative coalition. Two coalition partners needed to run in the same seats without splitting their vote against Labor. IRV solved that narrow problem. It did not deliver multi-party democracy.
After more than a century, the Australian House of Representatives remains effectively a two-party competition. The Senate — which uses a proportional system, not IRV — produces the genuine multi-party representation that House voters cannot achieve. The comparison within a single country, using the same electorate with two different methods, is the clearest available evidence that IRV does not break the two-party lock.
Across every major democracy that has attempted to move beyond its existing electoral system, a striking pattern emerges: when citizens deliberate independently on the question, they recommend proportional or score-based systems. When politicians design the reform, they tend to propose IRV — which preserves single-member districts, protects incumbents' geographic bases, and requires no fundamental restructuring of the party system.
Citizens' assemblies — groups of randomly selected ordinary people given time, expert testimony, and structured deliberation — have evaluated electoral systems in several countries. In every case, they recommended proportional systems, not IRV. The gap between what deliberating citizens conclude and what political negotiation produces points to the same answer: IRV's dominance in reform advocacy reflects organisational and political factors, not the conclusions of people reasoning carefully about democratic design.
The most authoritative democratic verdict on IRV came from Canada's Special Committee on Electoral Reform (ERRE), established in 2015 after the Liberal government won a majority on an explicit promise to end first-past-the-post. The process was the most thorough in any FPTP democracy's reform history: 57 public consultations across Canada, 196 written submissions, and 360,000 citizens participating in an online engagement survey. The committee was all-party and cross-partisan.
Its December 2016 report explicitly rejected preferential voting — IRV — as insufficient reform, and recommended a proportional system instead. The committee's reasoning: IRV does not significantly improve proportionality, and in the Canadian context would have redistributed seats toward the Liberals without producing fairer overall representation.
The structural irony is pointed: the Liberal government that commissioned the review personally preferred IRV — the system that would have benefited its party most. The independent committee, advised by electoral scientists and hearing from hundreds of thousands of Canadians, said no. The government then cancelled the reform entirely, citing "lack of consensus" — even though the committee had reached clear consensus against IRV. When the question of "which method best serves democracy?" was put to an independent body with full information and cross-partisan participation, IRV lost the argument.
The methods that cure what IRV merely treats are not more complex or more expensive. They are simpler.
Approval Voting changes one instruction on the ballot: instead of "pick one," voters may support as many candidates as they choose. Every candidate a voter approves receives a mark; the candidate with the most marks wins. Counting is precinct-summed, transparent, and identical in process to plurality voting. The spoiler effect is eliminated. Monotonicity is preserved. The centre-squeeze problem disappears. Implementation requires no new equipment and minimal voter education.
Score Voting extends this further: voters rate each candidate on a numerical scale — expressing not just approval but degree of support. A voter can give their first choice a 5, a broadly acceptable candidate a 3, and a strongly disliked candidate a 0. The candidate with the highest average score wins. The information content of the ballot increases; the complexity of counting does not.
Informed Score Voting adds two refinements: an "I Don't Know" option that protects against rewarding name recognition over merit, and a balanced negative-to-positive range that allows voters to express opposition as well as support. These design choices directly address the failure modes that have corrupted democratic politics — the victory of the merely famous over the genuinely capable.
All three methods eliminate the spoiler effect, preserve monotonicity, and can be counted with full transparency at the local level. All three form a natural upgrade path — each step building on the previous one without requiring an institutional overhaul. And the first step, from plurality to Approval Voting, is the easiest major electoral reform available. Countries still on plurality voting can reach it directly, without passing through IRV.