Sounds great in principle...but in this article by Brendan O'Neill (editor of spiked!) it really isn't that bright and shining pearl of democracy its supporters purport it to be. I've included some parts here, and as it's written mainly in British English, I've put some words in braces {example} for an American approximation. Anything bolded is also my emphasis.
AV is a form of super-technical majoritarianism. The way it works is through insisting that a candidate secure more than 50 per cent of votes before he is declared winner. So it asks voters to list their candidate choices in order of preference, marking them as 1, 2, 3 and so on. If after the first count no single candidate has 50 per cent of votes, then the candidate with the least number of votes is kicked out and those who voted for that candidate have their second-preference votes counted instead. This continues until one of the candidates – through a combination of his own first-preference votes and less keen voters’ second-preference votes for him – finally reaches the 50 per cent mark. So someone eventually wins, even if many of ‘his’ votes were cast very half-heartedly for him.Instead of voting for one person, you select people in terms of preference. When the voting is closed, the person who receives over 50% of the vote wins. If no one gets to the magic 50%, the person who has the lowest percentage is eliminated and the votes get passed around until someone hits 50%.
[AV] would make things less democratic, in two important ways: firstly through its impact on the act of voting, which would turn from being an impassioned statement into a watered-down listing of candidates you like, kind of like and dislike; and secondly through its impact on the act of deciding, which would more and more become a post-election, closed-off process of sifting through people’s preferences to try to decipher which candidate sort of represents the electorate’s desires.
AV would weaken the vote by implicitly inviting people, not to stamp their ballot paper with a heartfelt X for their party, but to scribble numbers next to various candidates, regardless of whether they feel very much for them. Voting would become less a declaration of belief and more a hedging of political bets.
The pro-AV lobby often points out that you will still be able to vote for only one candidate (or just two, or three, or four… it’s up to you). However, the knowledge that your first-preference vote might swiftly be discounted, and that second- or third-preference votes could become key in deciding the outcome of the election, will put moral pressure on voters to play the AV game, effectively to list their feelings about all the candidates rather than attach their flag to one of them. In keeping with our era of ideology-lite, where strong political convictions are seen as weird, voters will be tempted away from their so-called ‘tribal allegiances’ towards the expression of a more relativistic sentiment.
This could impact on what kinds of candidates are put forward for elections in the first place. Which political party will risk {campaigning} a hardcore individual[...]when it knows that if its candidate fails to secure 50 per cent of the vote in the first count then the views of other parties’ voters may become key? Today’s {weaker} parties rarely {campaign} risky candidates these days anyway; but with the introduction of AV we would likely see the party leaders exerting even more influence over which individuals are permitted to {campaign}, with the elbowing aside of those with possibly controversial beliefs in favour of more acceptable, politer and blander candidates who might not only pick up lots of [#]1's from said party’s traditional voters, but also some [#]2's and [#]3's from the other parties’ voters, too. AV would implicitly encourage the homogeni[z]ation of political life.
The new way of voting would also create enormous scope for {mischief}. The knowledge that second- and third-preference votes could become key will invite opportunistic lobbying between the various candidates and their minions. Under AV, the emphasis will inevitably shift from politicians appealing directly to the public for their outright political support and towards candidates cosying up to each other, striking deals, saying ‘get your people to give me their second-preference votes, and I’ll get mine to give them yours…" AV has a built-in tendency towards oligarchical relationship-building over direct, passionate, people-oriented electioneering.
Finally, AV would transform the traditional act of counting votes into a political form of tea-leaf-reading. Elections will be decided through the laborious process of sorting out preferences, expelling failing candidates one-by-one and subsequently spreading their supporters’ votes to other candidates. The people’s will would become something that is not so much clearly expressed in the election itself, in the act of voting, but rather something that is worked out after the election by officials and experts. Politics would become less open, less forged in the public realm, and more an act of elite deciphering of what ‘the people’ seemingly prefer rather than want. We could easily end up with representatives that no one truly, passionately, wants.
In short, AV will both weaken The Vote and strengthen electoral bureaucracy. It will encourage even more candidates not to stand on a platform of ideas or policies that they are prepared to live and die by, but rather to take fewer political risks and always to keep one eye on the lowest common denominator of appealing to as many people as possible. And AV will strengthen the hand of that expert caste of middle-class negotiators and well-connected, well-educated political players who already dominate much of the modern political sphere. It will be a travesty for democracy.
Which may be the reason why some people, who despise the current, yet imperfect electoral system, would love to have IRV up and running. Or maybe not...if IRV were active during the 2010 Mass Gubernatorial elections, and Tim Cahill and Jill Stein were eliminated, the 9% of the votes would have gone to Charlie Baker rather than Deval Patrick, and Baker would have been governor. And, for the reasons listed above, vote pandering and dealing would dilute the very idea of voting in the first place - and dilute the votes themselves.
