This is the second post in a series on voting reform:

If you’re not sure what our current FPTP voting system is or why it needs to go, get your learn on with Power IRV (intro). Otherwise, read on!



The best alternative to FPTP

OK, so we can all agree that the “First Past the Post” (FPTP) voting system sucks more than the Flowbee and is overdue for an overhaul.

It's sucking my will to live

FPTP certainly does suck.

OK Mr. Smarty Pants, what’s better than FPTP then?

It’s Ranked Choice Voting! Well… or Instant Runoff Voting. Ummm… or the Alternative Vote.

So confused

Not confusing at all.

OK, so these are all talking about the same thing.

Here, we’re going to call this approach Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which basically says:

  1. Rank as many candidates as you like in order from highest to lowest
  2. Count all the top votes
  3. If no candidate has more than 50% of the vote:
    • drop the lowest vote-getter from this round
    • move any votes for that dropped candidate to the voters’ next choice
  4. Repeat until someone has > 50% of all votes (or you only have one candidate left)

Pick as many as you like

Rank as many choices as you like.

This video from CGP Grey goes through exactly how IRV (aka the “Alternative Vote”) works and how it solves the problem of the Spoiler Effect we went through in Part 1:

Wallaby bringing the heat

OK, so either you watched the video, or you want me to give you the 411 here because who watches videos really - ain’t nobody got time for that.

I did my own research ain't nobody got time for that

The long and the short of it is if you are sick of explaining to your 3rd-party friends that voting for Bernie Sanders, or Jo Jorgensen, or Howie Hawkins, or Vermin Supreme is just throwing away your vote and why can’t you just get with the program and realize that your ideological purity isn’t making a damn bit of difference.

Go ahead, throw your vote away

OK then - we should just switch over to IRV and everything’s all good, right?

If only.

(sorry Queen Lion 😒)

Unfortunately there’s a key flaw with basic IRV called the Center Squeeze effect.

IRV is great if your candidate either:

  • has no chance to win, or
  • is certain to win

Unfortunately it fails just when your favorite 3rd-party candidate has enough support to finally get into the final 2 candidates, and instead:

your candidate loses to the least-favorite opponent.

That’s not super obvious, so let’s go to another video - this time from the Center for Election Science which explains how our voting system (and IRV) can force you to betray your favourite candidate:

I love this video. Definitely watch this one.

Well, thanks for nothing then.

Hold up, wait a minute

At this point, you might be asking yourself “Isn’t this whole series supposed to be about Power IRV? Why haven’t you told me about that at all yet?”

Yes, here it is - the moment you’ve been waiting for!

So Power IRV is just a tweak to the basic IRV approach that fixes this Center Squeeze problem:

Power IRV works exactly like regular IRV until you get down to the last 3 finalists.

Then the trick is to just pick the winner from those 3 finalists by:

  • seeing who would win between each pair of candidates
  • whoever beats both both other candidates head-to-head: congrats! You win!

This is how we fix the Center Squeeze problem: by keeping the Good candidate in the final round of 3, you can see that they beat both Bad and Ideal overall, and so they should be the winner - and they are!

There are a few more nuances and edge cases that we explore in Power IRV (part 2), but that gives you the basic Power IRV idea.

Convinced yet?

Yeah you are. Let’s do this.

Tell your friends, tell your Congresspeople, push for Power IRV in your local elections and with voting reform organizations such as FairVote.

And if you want to learn more and really see how Power IRV works in-depth, please keep going and read: