The United States should adopt Instant Runoff Voting.

Thanks for the quick response Mr. Voices. Let's look to my points and whether my opponent adequately refutes them. 1) IRV increases strategic voting My original argument was that ranking your preferred candidate as number 1 can make him/her lose and ranking your least preferred candidate last can help him/her to win. This makes no sense. People have to vote strategically under IRV as well to prevent their votes from being wasted or having a counterproductive result. My opponent says that you can just leave the box blank. But this doesn't answer the argument that "ranking a candidate higher can actually cause the candidate to lose, and ranking a candidate lower can cause the candidate to win." If you leave the box blank, that's equivalent to ranking the candidate last. It doesn't change the problems with IRV. 2) Extra candidates My argument was that IRV is stupid because it's possible that candidate A beats candidate B in a head-to-head election, but if candidate C enters the race, suddenly candidate B beats candidate A. That makes absolutely no sense. Parties will run fake candidates to split the vote of popular candidates so they don't make it to the final 2. My opponent just nitpicks an assumption I make in the scenario I gave, but that's the point of giving hypotheticals: it simplifies the issue so it's easier to understand. And it's not that far-fetched. Median voter theory states that voters will prefer candidates who are closer to them on the political spectrum. So if this is the political spectrum: Liberal Conservative Then it's not that far-fetched to believe that if candidate A loses, all of his supporters will instead vote for candidate B. This proves that fielding extra candidates DOES split the vote, potentially causing the winner in a head-to-head election to instead lose in the first round of vote counting. 3) The candidate with majority support can lose My opponent's response has something to do with doing a poll under the current system. However, the point of this objection is that under ALL voting systems, the person who is preferred by a majority should win (assuming you believe in democracy). However, if you remember the example of John, David, and Peter, the majority preferred John to David, but David wins because Peter knocks John out of the race in round 1. Yet 60% of voters preferred John to David. A "first past the post" system better upholds democratic values. 4) People won't research all the additional candidates. My opponent says that this happens now. However, NOW there are usually only two viable candidates. Under instant runoff, your choice of who to rank second or third could entirely sway the outcome of the election. This requires a level of research that people do not do. The two party system simplifies the electoral process for people. I wonder how the majority of voters will choose their rankings, given that few people do research on candidates. It's a double bind: either people rank third party candidates without researching them (which undermines democracy) OR they do the responsible thing and don't rank anyone but the Democrat and Republican, which is functionally the same as the current system. Best case, my opponent is advocating for the current system. Worst case, he is advocating for people making uninformed rankings that can completely alter the outcome of the election. 5) Ballot counting My opponent advocates hand counting. However, his source's speculative claim doesn't seem to be true. You have to pay people to count the ballots by hand. You also have to print a different type of ballot than the ones we currently use with machines. I would like my opponent to prove we can afford such a system. In addition, hand counting leads to its own problems. In Republican states, it is likely Republicans would be counting the ballots. When there are marginal ballots where it's unclear who someone voted for, Republican vote counters are going to be biased and award more marginal ballots to the Republican candidate. Bryan Pfaffenberger, a professor at the University of Virginia, points out, "By taking paper out of the voting process, mechanical voting machines make it impossible for anyone to invalidate a ballot. A complex interlocking system – a technological achievement – prevents overvoting, in which a voter casts votes for more candidates than the law permits. Above all, the voting machine's virtue was precisely that it left nothing for partisan election officials to haggle over." He continues, "Returning to [hand counting] might work well in areas with lots of oversight, but in contrast to other stable democracies, this movement has made little progress in the US. Throughout most of the country, today's election system has more in common with that of the 1890s: It's inadequately supervised, insufficiently professionalized, and all too often staffed with openly partisan officials. Under these circumstances, what voting machine backers believed a century ago still holds true: It just isn't wise to let people count ballots." http://www.csmonitor.com... My opponent also doesn't answer the following arguments: *Federalism: each State has the right to adopt its own system. The federal government cannot mandate how they apportion votes. *Electoral college: IRV doesn't work well with winner take all. In states that award electors proportionate to a candidate's share of the vote, you're not "throwing your vote away" if you vote third party. That person still gets electors. If all states adopted proportionate systems, that would be preferable to IRV. *Multi-party presidential systems are bad. The Kellogg School (at Northwestern) found that in all of history, there has only been ONE stable multi-party presidential system. Most presidential systems with successful third parties stagnate because the legislature can't get anything done. We can barely get anything done with two parties who always disagree. Imagine if we had 4 or 5 disagreeing. *The Guardian's analysis of the 2010 UK election shows that IRV does NOT increase the number of third party candidates that win. So IRV doesn't accomplish my opponent's goals anyways. *If you don't want to throw your vote away, vote for one of the two major parties. This solves. Even under IRV, Ross Perot would have still lost. The only way IRV could have possibly changed the outcome is that Bush might have beat Clinton because IRV might have screwed up the election. The lack of third parties has to do with our form of government (presidential vs. parliamentary), and NOT with the way the votes are counted.