If IRV complexity and explanations were not a problem, we wouldn't see today's reality where IRV proponents themselves constantly make incorrect claims about it.
Not always (and not in the linked article here), but often people get the intuition that their 2nd choice will get counted when their 1st choice is eliminated, and then try to get them to understand why their 2nd choice was not counted (because their 2nd choice had already been eliminated) while someone else's 2nd choice was counted…
What happened in Burlington before they repealled IRV shows not only people getting intuitions about IRV wrong but people often don't even get what happened in Burlington because it seems so counter-intuitive. https://www.equal.vote/Burlington
And yet, that scenario is common enough. Burlington is just the case where all the ballot stats were released so we can study it.
With FPTP voting, C would have won of the three candidates, and A would have placed last. If you removed A from the race, B would have won - and did!
Alternate voting systems are supposed to produce different results from plurality voting, and that's often unsettling the first time it happens.
That page makes the claim that IRV produced a bad result and that's why it was replaced. But at least the candidate with the 2nd-most 1st place votes won. If instead the Condorcet winner, A, had won, do they really think it would have been better? A got the _least_ 1st place votes of the three, who's to say there wouldn't have been an even larger backlash?
FPTP is even worse than IRV, except that people know how it is bad so they adapt accordingly.
Of course, it's speculation about the specific backlash, but the core issue in IRV is this (and it happens in the Burlington case):
ALL the voters whose 1st choice loses in the final round never get any of their other preferences counted and they lose their 1st choice. They get NOTHING, no say, totally screwed. They could be as much as 49% of voters. Now, WITHIN IRV, they can later learn (as people have learned about strategy in FPTP) that if they betray their favorite and vote for their lesser-evil choice as 1st, then they WILL swing the election to their lesser-evil instead of the greater evil.
By ignoring the preferences of some voters and counting others, the weighting is unequal and people will feel disenfranchised.
Maybe this older more thorough discussion of the Burlington case will help you understand: https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html
The core point is that voters in IRV can get a preferable outcome via favorite betrayal (a dishonest strategy). Either they do use that strategy and we're back to the lesser-evil problems we have now, or they don't use that strategy and we're back to vote-splitting like we have now, where a candidate choosing to run can both lose and cause a worse outcome for their supporters.
Another way of seeing this could be that such voters had their 1st choice considered and given value all the way until the last round, whereas many other voters had their lesser choices considered in their previous rounds. The 1rst-choicers-all-the-way-till-the-end could be considered more favored than the latter voters I mentioned, who lost their favorite candidates earlier on in the process.
I'm not saying that this is a better interpretation of the situation you posit. I'm just using it to illustrate that it's hard, maybe impossible, to get away from subjective criteria when we consider the virtues of various voting systems.
by the way, Fargo North Dakota just adopted approval voting for their City elections tonight.
The problem, though, is one of correctness, not complexity -- I would maintain that almost anyone could look at that election summary and understand why the conclusion that was reached was reached. And if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same. It's hard to even explain why the outcome was "wrong" because the tabulation of the results is so intuitive.
> I seriously doubt that anyone would get a headache over "if people had given that losing candidate higher scores, they would have won". I don't even see how you can honestly claim that to be anything but completely intuitive to everyone.
The question for the intuition is "how many stars to I give this candidate". What does it mean to give them one more star? One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd. An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews.
Certainly not! In Burlington, people know the Republican can't win. So, like everyone in the current system, people would (and have both before and since IRV) vote strategically. So, the less-hardcore Republicans would vote Democrat in order to stop the Progressive.
In fact, if IRV had not been repealed, a good portion of the Republicans would betray their favorite and vote Dem as 1st choice (dishonestly) in the future in order to stop the Progressive from ever winning again.
Furthermore, when vote splitting happens in a current system, everyone readily gets why it was "wrong" and they adapt their strategies accordingly.
> What does it mean to give them one more star?
It means they are one more point ahead of the others.
> One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd
The weight is relative, that's all that matters. As long as people understand the system, they can realize that they are throwing away part of their vote if they only put a 1-star and nothing else. Four people who put 1-star for candidate A might have put 5 stars for candidate B. They are influencing the race just as much as anyone else.
Here's what it means to be equal: Any voter can score the opposite of another voter and they will cancel out. Our votes can have equal weight if that's possible. That's not always possible in our current system or with IRV.
> An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews.
If there were 110 voters, then every item is relative to that vote. There's 100 1-star votes for candidate A and 10 5-star votes for candidate B? That means candidate B got zeros (blanks are no points) from 100 candidates. A candidate with 100 zero-star votes and only 10 5-star votes is a worse option.
Within a strict ranked-ballot approach, the overall best tabulation is probably Ranked Pairs.
STAR has some similarities with Bucklin but does not have its problems. STAR's advantages are several and aren't directly just a forgone conclusion merely by showing what's wrong with IRV. STAR is much simpler to tabulate than Ranked Pairs and doesn't need to be tabulated at the highest level, it can be counted at precincts like FPTP.
Intuiting what "giving one star more or less to a candidate" means is really difficult to understand as a voter. "If more voters had given Kodos four stars instead of three, he could have won" is a headache inducing explanation.
Approval voting is the only alternative to IRV or plurality voting that seems to match the level of intuitiveness of both the voting process and the tabulation process.