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Instant Runoff Voting (known as Alternative Vote in many countries) is a Voting system for single-seat elections. Mathematically, it is simply Single transfer voting with a district size of 1. It is designed to emulate a series of runoff elections. |
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Instant Runoff Voting (known as Alternative Vote in many countries) is a Voting system used for elections in single-member districts. It is used, among other places, to elect the House of Representatives in Australia. |
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Tactical voting is useless in IRV. If you vote for a candidate who does not have a good chance to win, you still get to express a preference between the most-popular candidates. No advantage is given to those voters who expressed their preference for a popular candidate earlier, rather than later. |
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Tactical voting is more difficult under IRV than under plurality voting or standard runoff voting. However, it is not impossible. The basic premise of tactical voting in IRV is to ensure that the proper mix of candidates are left standing toward the end. |
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See also: Runoff voting |
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For example, suppose there are three candidates: Andrea, Brad, and Carter. It is expected (maybe due to polling) that Andrea will receive 40% of the initial vote, Brad 31%, and Carter 29%. It is also expected that all of Carter's support will prefer Brad to Andrea, whereas half of Brad's support prefer Andrea to Carter. This is not an absurd situation if you say that Andrea is left-of-center, Brad centrist, and Carter right-of-center. In order to attain victory in the final round, some of Andrea's supporters may break off and instead vote Carter first, then Andrea. This would lift Carter to victory over Brad in the first round, after which, Brad's votes, evenly split, lift Andrea to victory in the second round. This scenario is identical to one that may occur in standard runoff voting. See also: Runoff voting, Single transfer voting |
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