Look at the results linked at zesty.ca: it’s not clear that IRV is progress. Meanwhile, approval voting is simple, easy to understand and to switch to, and a clearer improvement on the status quo. This is why the frustration.

I mean, if we're going to finally be able to switch it, why not switch to the best option instead of starting with the second worst and switching again later?

Because I am not sure what's best. I'd have a vote to find out whether there is a best, but I'm not sure what's the best voting system.

But these things aren't degrees of one another, they're totally different.

Saying "we only ever eat meat, let's try eating an orange and see if we like it before we eat any of this lettuce" doesn't follow any actual logic. You might hate lettuce, you might hate oranges, but there's no specific factor that binds them together.

Also what sort of things would you factor into what you prefer? How important is each of them?

> I mean, if we're going to finally be able to switch it, why not switch to the best option instead of starting with the second worst and switching again later?

Because that kind of lesser-of-two-evils incrementalist attitude is inherent to the first-past-the-post system we have now.

Because X++ is just as easy (and difficult) to implement as X.

If my choice is between 1% of what I want, 2% of what I want or 99% of what I want, saying "why don't you just be happy with 2% since it's twice as good as the 1% you could have gotten" isn't the most logical point to make.

I care much more about getting a good voting system than I do improving our voting system, if that makes sense.

I would make the stronger claim that IRV is an even worse voting system than the one we already have. At least with FPTP voters can easily figure out the effect of their vote. With IRV it can be ridiculously hard to interpret, and relies on a lot of strategic thinking like "well, I think candidate A isn't great and so will not have enough support to make it to the later rounds, so I might as well rank A first so that maybe they can eliminate someone else I don't like before they get eliminated and then my vote gets transferred to my actual top choice... oops too many people did this and now candidate A won"

This could also be viewed as a feature rather than a bug. Make it complex enough and maybe people will fall back to "Vote for the candidates you want to see win, in order of preference, and quit worrying about how everybody else is voting", which is how elections are supposed to work.

There's an impossibility theorem (Gibbard's) that states that for any non-dictatorial process for choosing among > 2 outcomes, there is no way to avoid tactical voting potentially swaying the results. The next-best alternative might be to make tactical voting so complex and error-prone that nobody bothers.

I worry that this provides a very strong tool for people to make arguments that "ranked voting systems don't work, since you're always confused by their results" and have a strong case to bring everyone back to FPTP.