The United States should adopt Instant Runoff Voting.

Thanks Mr. Voices. ==Reasons why instant runoff voting (IRV) is bad== 1) Strategic Voting Let's say there are three parties: the Libertarian Party, the Democrats, and the Republicans. Each party has one candidate in the race. If I want the Libertarian Party candidate to win the most, but the second preference in the Democrat, then I'm SUPPOSED to rank the Libertarian as #1 and the Democrat as #2. But let's say that most of the Democratic voters are likely to rank the Democrat as #1, the Republican as #2, and the Libertarian as #3 (since Democrats see Libertarians as even more politically extreme than Republicans). That would mean that if the Democrat is eliminated first, a huge number of votes go to the Republican candidate (the candidate that I DON'T want to win). As a result, it makes sense for me to rank the Democrat first and the Libertarian second, in an attempt to keep the Democratic candidate in the race. Then the Republican votes will all go to the Libertarian candidate (because Republicans see Libertarian small government values as closer to their own). Thus, NOT voting for my own candidate makes it more likely that my candidate wins. It wouldn't be difficult for political strategists to calculate the above and tell voters how to vote strategically. So the first major problem with IRV is: "It is an erratic voting system because ranking a candidate higher can actually cause the candidate to lose, and ranking a candidate lower can cause the candidate to win." http://minguo.info... 2) Extra candidates In Wisconsin, Republicans entered themselves as fake Democrats in many open primary races because this might have altered the outcome of the election. In the same way, IRV has the perplexing characteristic that merely adding an additional candidate to the race can alter the outcome. For example, let's say there are 2 candidates, John and David. John would get 60% of the vote and David would get 40% of the vote if they went head to head. Now let's say we add in Peter. A lot of John's supporters really like Peter but David's supporters hate Peter, so the vote is 40% Peter, 40% David, and 20% John. John gets eliminated. The problem is, the 20% staunch John supporters prefer David over Peter, so now David wins. So fielding a candidate that can steal votes away from the likely winner is a good political strategy. Republicans can field fake Democrats or fake liberals to siphon votes away from a likely winner, and Democrats can field fake conservatives. In political science, a voting system is considered bad when merely adding one additional candidate alters the outcome. In addition, you can see that the candidate that was preferred by a majority (60% preferred John to David) can still LOSE in an IRV system. This is nonsensical. My opponent mentions that IRV is used in the Bay Area. Oakland's Mayor Jean Quan beat the candidate who was preferred by an overwhelming plurality because the third candidate in the race ran a campaign that said, "vote for me, but rank Jean Quan second." This is nonsensical in a world where most people don't research candidates but merely vote the party line. They will do their rankings however their party's candidate tells them to. So two more objections: 3) The candidate with majority support can lose. 4) People don't research candidates, so adding more candidates and more choices is bad. Another objection is: 5) Ballot counting problems "It is also much more difficult to implement with security and integrity because the votes cannot be summed as in most other election methods." (same source) We would need to buy need vote counting systems to implement rank order voting. This would be expensive. My opponent needs to prove that states can afford this. In addition, my opponent's proposal violates federalism because states each determine individually how to count votes. My opponent needs to explain how this would even work with the electoral college. Some states are winner take all - whichever candidate wins gets ALL of the states electors, whereas other states award electors proportionately to that candidate's share of the total vote. Proportionate states essentially do something similar to IRV in that if a third party candidate wins 10% of the vote, he or she gets 10% of the electors. This is preferable to a system of IRV plus winner take all, which has all the problems listed above. Lastly, since the vote counting system is more complex, recalls would be more difficult and hanging chads more problematic. Given the unfairness of Bush v. Gore, adding to our recount problems in the US would be bad. ==Rebuttal== My opponent claims that IRV gives third parties a greater chance. This isn't true. "Like all winner-take-all voting systems, IRV tends to exaggerate the number of seats won by the largest parties; small parties without majority support in any given constituency are unlikely to earn seats in a legislature ... A simulation of IRV in the 2010 UK general election by the Electoral Reform Society concluded that the election would have altered the balance of seats between the three main parties, but the number of seats won by minor parties would have remained unchanged." (sources: Mtholyoke.edu and The Guardian) http://en.wikipedia.org... In addition, turn, in a non-parliamentary system, third parties make the government more unstable because it is impossible to build coalitions and thus it is impossible to pass any legislation. In a parliamentary system, third parties must be included into the majority coalition who chooses the prime minister. However, presidential systems don't allow such coalition building. A study by the Kellogg Institute concluded that, "the combination of a multiparty system and a presidential system is inimical to stable democracy ... among all of the cases (past or present) of stable presidential democracy, only one—the Chilean—had a multiparty system. In presidential democracies, two-party systems are more capable of avoiding immobilism and intense legislative/executive conflict because they facilitate the formation of a government with a majority (or close to it) in congress, and also because ideological polarization is less likely with only two parties." So turn this argument against my opponent. Third parties would be bad. Lastly, the strategic voting that my opponent talks about SOLVES. If you're Libertarian and you know your candidate can't win, you should vote for the candidate who is closest to you on the political spectrum, which would most likely be the Republican. This solves the problem of your vote not counting. Under IRV, in the BEST CASE scenario, when your third party candidate loses, your vote just goes to the Republican anyway. In the worst case scenario, you accidentally helped the Democrat win with IRV.