> What is the simple way to pitch its advantage to IRV without using technical terms?

Good question. It's probably that the tabulation works the way a voter thinks it would.

Neither IRV/RCV nor approval has a way to tell how much more you prefer your favorite to your #2 or #3 (something STAR/Score has, and kudos to it). What's that mean? They both have to assume. Most voters don't realize that IRV assumes massive gulfs between their #1, #2, and #3.

The example I give is Seattle's 2021 mayoral race, which has 15 candidates, at least 8 of whom are running serious races. With 8+ serious candidates, all sharing the left-of-center spectrum, there's tons of overlap. So, imagine you and a friend or spouse have similar views and support the same candidates, but rank them subtly differently. You rank A, B, C, your friend ranks B, C, A. In each runoff, your and your friend's opinions will end up competing with one another, even though both of you share the same opinions and support the same candidates.

(For anyone else reading, here's a longer version that I didn't write: https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec.... Ignore the title - the problem isn't extreme or not extreme, it's that the result doesn't reflect the opinion of the electorate.)

And the reverse is also true. IRV unintentionally rewards candidates who have their own dedicated constituency who always put their candidate #1. While it's not my role to moralize about that, choosing a candidate because a small group of voters vehemently support a candidate is not likely to make the most voters happy.

Since you brought up simple explanations.. a related simple benefit is that essentially everyone can explain how winners are chosen in approval voting. Very few people, even many active proponents of IRV, can thoroughly explain tabulation of IRV ballots. In an era when election processes are becoming politicized, a system that the average person understands well enough to explain to someone else is valuable.

I'm ignoring the most obvious easy-to-explain reason, that it does a better job of "reading voters minds." That's part of the original submission, though.

(I've now talked or exchanged emails with a fair number of people who thought they were RCV/IRV supports, and I learned that STAR delivers the benefits that many or most assumed that RCV provides. STAR lets you score every candidate on a 1-5 star scale, so you can rate candidates the same, rate them better/worse than one another, and critically, can decide for yourself how big each gap is. The vast majority of people who think they're strongly supportive of RCV/IRV would switch their support to STAR if they heard of it, and when I talk with them, they often do switch.)

> My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting.

I support IRV as an improvement, but I'd need more evidence that IRV opens the door for approval - or that it doesn't. If you have evidence or at least a hypothesis how that would happen, I'd appreciate it.

For example, would IRV fail (what's that mean?), yet voters would not recoil, they'd decide they like the idea and just chose the wrong thing? Or would it succeed and people would look for something better? Something else?

My baseline is that it took us something like 200 years to get here (and 30 years since FairVote was created). If history is a guide, whatever we pick seems like it'll stick around for a while. That's a weakly held belief, though.

> When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this, since I don't oppose IRV - I just don't support it anywhere near as much as I do approval or STAR. My take is simpler: Seattle doesn't have either right now, and if we're going to switch, getting something great on the ballot (an initiative to change to AV) doesn't require any more lobbying or fundraising effort than something good or okay.

A skeptic could have asked "But will it pass?" until a year or two ago. St. Louis just switched to approval last year (https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/overha...) and 68% of voters were in favor (!), and Fargo, ND switched so in 2019, so that's been affirmed. The Center for Election Science was only created in 2011, so for 9 years (3-5 years of which was discovery), that's a fast adoption curve.

Also, approval is the only one that I think delivers enough benefit to be worth a significant amount of my own time. That's an entirely personal judgment though.

(I'd have a different answer if AV fans were running an explicit campaign against an IRV/RCV initiative that was on the ballot, but again, that's not me. At least in Seattle, I don't think either one is more or less difficult than the other.)