I think the strongest argument is this:

Nearly all IRV-advocates and voters using IRV wrongly believe that it somehow is tabulated optimally and has no spoilers. If everyone transparently understood the IRV spoiler scenarios, they would not react particularly strongly to the cases where it arises. However, IRV is almost always oversold with claims that are false. People believe that winners always have majority support or that spoilers can't happen. Thus, IRV sets up a situation to risk losing the public's trust.

A system that violates people's basic intuitions is a system people will be suspicious of.

Because IRV spoilers are both hard to explain, hard to look at the ballots and understand, and violate people's intuitions, it is a set-up for the destruction of trust in elections and in voting reform as a movement in general.

This is far worse than the effect of the spoiler itself.

The most important feature of a voting system is that it is easy for people to understand the results and trust that the system is working and thus feel trusting of the democratic process overall.

Yeah. Everyone, including Fairvote, emphasizes that electoral systems change campaign behavior and voting behavior. There is no realistic scenario in which you change voting systems and all other behavior in the system stays. Discussing that artificial situation is only useful as a conceptual exercise in comparing some particular point in the math or something, not as an assertion about counterfactual situations.

There's no possibility that single-choice plurality voting in Burlington 2009 would have this 3-way race as it was. All the media and voters and everyone (candidates included) would have come to some pre-election idea of Montroll or Kiss as the primary non-Republican and the other as dangerous spoiler. They would have had that argument. And the result would be likely Montroll winning but maybe Kiss or even the Republican and then all the spoiler-blame fall-out. There's NO chance it would have avoided all those well-known dynamics.

I'm a maybe but I don't have a direct conflict that evening, there's no clearly better time for me.

Over years, I've continually said that misrepresenting IRV is worse than IRV itself. I don't support IRV, but I can tolerate it if advocates somehow promote it without false statements. However, a system that is almost impossible to clearly discuss with lay people without false statements is a problem of the system itself.

On that same page where Fairvote talks about Condorcet and such:

It may be disputed whether it would have been better for Montroll to win the election despite attracting so little core support. However, it is certain that Montroll would have also lost under a two-round runoff election or a single-choice plurality election.

This is plainly wrong. Under a plurality election, we know with certainty that voters will be strategic, and that is why Montroll would have won. Their wording is missing the key point, and can be true only with this change:

it is certain that Montroll would have also lost under a two-round runoff election or a single-choice plurality election — if the voters were all completely honest, which we know plurality voting not to be.

Fairvote in this argument is trying to assert that IRV cannot be worse than single-choice plurality. They assert that by selectively ignoring the entire issue of strategic voting, even though they focus elsewhere on strategic voting. Fairvote is a model for motivated reasoning over fair reasoning.

Yeah. Everyone, including Fairvote, emphasizes that electoral systems change campaign behavior and voting behavior. There is no realistic scenario in which you change voting systems and all other behavior in the system stays. Discussing that artificial situation is only useful as a conceptual exercise in comparing some particular point in the math or something, not as an assertion about counterfactual situations.

There's no possibility that single-choice plurality voting in Burlington 2009 would have this 3-way race as it was. All the media and voters and everyone (candidates included) would have come to some pre-election idea of Montroll or Kiss as the primary non-Republican and the other as dangerous spoiler. They would have had that argument. And the result would be likely Montroll winning but maybe Kiss or even the Republican and then all the spoiler-blame fall-out. There's NO chance it would have avoided all those well-known dynamics.

Over years, I've continually said that misrepresenting IRV is worse than IRV itself. I don't support IRV, but I can tolerate it if advocates somehow promote it without false statements. However, a system that is almost impossible to clearly discuss with lay people without false statements is a problem of the system itself.

On that same page where Fairvote talks about Condorcet and such:

It may be disputed whether it would have been better for Montroll to win the election despite attracting so little core support. However, it is certain that Montroll would have also lost under a two-round runoff election or a single-choice plurality election.

This is plainly wrong. Under a plurality election, we know with certainty that voters will be strategic, and that is why Montroll would have won. Their wording is missing the key point, and can be true only with this change:

it is certain that Montroll would have also lost under a two-round runoff election or a single-choice plurality election — if the voters were all completely honest, which we know plurality voting not to be.

Fairvote in this argument is trying to assert that IRV cannot be worse than single-choice plurality. They assert that by selectively ignoring the entire issue of strategic voting, even though they focus elsewhere on strategic voting. Fairvote is a model for motivated reasoning over fair reasoning.

I think the strongest argument is this:

Nearly all IRV-advocates and voters using IRV wrongly believe that it somehow is tabulated optimally and has no spoilers. If everyone transparently understood the IRV spoiler scenarios, they would not react particularly strongly to the cases where it arises. However, IRV is almost always oversold with claims that are false. People believe that winners always have majority support or that spoilers can't happen. Thus, IRV sets up a situation to risk losing the public's trust.

A system that violates people's basic intuitions is a system people will be suspicious of.

Because IRV spoilers are both hard to explain, hard to look at the ballots and understand, and violate people's intuitions, it is a set-up for the destruction of trust in elections and in voting reform as a movement in general.

This is far worse than the effect of the spoiler itself.

The most important feature of a voting system is that it is easy for people to understand the results and trust that the system is working and thus feel trusting of the democratic process overall.

@Marylander Thanks for your reply. Yes, the theory of the criteria work just as you suggest. I'm also interested in feedback on the exact wording as well as on the ramifications of the policy and whether people want to advocate that we consider actually adjusting the policy itself (not just the wording).

I'm a co-founder and Board member of an org (Snowdrift.coop to be specific) that is working out Bylaws. Here's the draft I did for the voting-related wording:

methods and means which, for cases other than binary yes/no questions, allow each voter to express support for any and all of the available options and which calculate the results in a manner accounting for all such indicated support

The goal is to lock in some very basic principles with enough flexibility that we don't have to hash out getting everyone involved right now to fully understand voting theory or take my word for it that we should just go with STAR etc. We also want it to be relatively clear and short, not a big voting-theory block of Bylaws material, at least no more than needed.

Of course, there are lots of criteria we all debate on and on. And whether voting itself is even the right way to make decisions or elect people is a valid question. But we're looking to just have a usable Bylaws so we can move forward. Perfect is the enemy of the Good.

We can still as a Board decide how voting will work outside of the Bylaws, and if we have a solid decision, we can amend the Bylaws. But the wording above obviously mandates the criteria it does, which I think blocks the worst choices from among the options that anyone in the world actually advocates for.

Thoughts?

I'm a maybe but I don't have a direct conflict that evening, there's no clearly better time for me.