The United States should adopt Instant Runoff Voting.

Thanks for the response. 1) IRV increases strategic voting The argument here is that, paradoxically, ranking your favored candidate last may increase his chance of winning and ranking your least favored candidate first can increase his chance of losing. My opponent's repeats that you can just not mark your least favorite at all. However, there are two problems with this: 1) the argument about strategic voting has more to do with the wisdom of marking your favored candidate as #1, since in many scenarios this is actually counter-productive and 2) not marking a candidate is THE SAME as marking a candidate last, since the candidate with your lowest rank can never receive your vote. When it comes down to two candidates, your vote could only potentially go to your second least favorite candidate. So when votes are being tallied, not ranking someone is treated the same as voting them last. My opponent seems to be the one who doesn't fully understand IRV. 2) Adding candidates alters the outcome of the election My opponent doesn't answer this argument at all. IRV creates a new, unique problem in that you can eliminate popular candidates in early "rounds" of voting by splitting the vote count. It makes no sense to adopt a voting system where candidate A beats candidate B in a head-to-head (meaning voters prefer candidate A to candidate B), but if you add in a third candidate (candidate C), suddenly candidate B wins the election. Beyond fake candidates, this outcome simply makes no sense. We should never adopt voting systems, by choice, that lead to absurd outcomes. My opponent concedes that this phenomenon happens under IRV. 3) Majority preference I agree with my opponent that under both "first past the post" and IRV, the candidate with majority support can *theoretically* lose. However, in practice, it's more likely that a majority support candidate loses under IRV because under our current system, people understand that voting for a third party is equivalent to throwing their votes away. However, IRV is a MUCH more complex system and people may not understand how their voting behavior is negatively impacting the candidate that they prefer. So it's more likely that the wrong candidate wins under IRV. If you combine IRV with open primaries, the system becomes even more complex and even more likely to result in strange election outcomes. My opponent has the burden to show that IRV would work in open primary states, like Wisconsin. 4) People won't research all the candidates My opponent says that the third party candidates would be invited to the presidential debates "if they had a good chance of winning." The current policy is that you have to be polling at 10% or higher to be invited. If no one knows who you are, how can you ever poll at above 10%? It's a chicken-and-egg problem: you won't be invited to the debate unless people know who you are, but my opponent's only method of educating voters is to have 3rd party candidates attend the debates. My opponent doesn't have a *good* answer to the uninformed electorate double bind: that either people vote without becoming informed (which is bad) or only rank the Republican and Democrat, which is the same as the current system. My opponent also never responds to my turn: that multi-party presidential systems are unstable forms of government and lead to legislative stagnation. My opponent says that uninformed voters happen now, but the two party system and party platforms simplify the electoral process. People can vote for a party platform instead of researching individual candidates. 5) Vote counting My opponent drops my evidence from Bryan Pfaffenberger: that in the US, with the weak oversight we have over elections, openly partisan election officials can easily tamper with ballots if we use hand counting. Countries that hand count currently have MUCH better election oversight than does the US. We cannot possibly switch and maintain a fair system. The biases of the people counting will affect to whom they award marginal votes, when it's "unclear" for whom someone voted. My opponent still drops my arguments that: 1) federalism means the US cannot mandate IRV, 2) awarding electors proportionately solves better than using a winner take all/IRV system for the electoral college, 3) multi-party presidential systems are bad, 4) refusing to vote 3rd party because it's "a waste of a vote" already solves now.