I would prefer Score Voting or maybe even Approval Voting for simplicity, but SRV looks very very good, and addresses concerns about not electing the proverbial "majority winner". Thus SRV may be more politically viable, which counts for a lot.
And it's _certainly_ better than the Instant Runoff Voting system that Maine just adopted.
Clay Shentrup
Co-founder, The Center for Election Science
Yeah, I agree in some regards. I especially dislike "majority winner" as an ideal. But at least Score Runoff gets the runoff candidates as consensus options from pure score (although that means it loses the value of score for 2-candidate situations.
Instant-runoff advocates have a series of arguments against score
voting and only one of them is valid: the concern about an unequal balance of
strategic voting from one side and not the other. And since Score Runoff
addresses that (and even addresses the wrong arguments about the supposed
value of majorities), Score Runoff means the only critique any IRV person can
validly present is that SRV isn't simple. Of course, IRV isn't any simpler.
I find it baffling that all the energy seems to focus on the worst of the
voting reforms. Condorcet and Borda and other rank systems are even themselves
better than IRV, regarldess of the fundamental problems with all rank systems.
Anyway, if some people put in the time and energy to mount a real reform
campaign for anything other than IRV, I'd still support it. I really want
everyone to get behind cardinal (i.e. rating) systems of some sort.
Approval, score, and score runoff all have their merits and are all
acceptable and better than rank voting (especially better than IRV)
As long as we're talking about a cardinal system, I'm going to join whatever
movement gets the most headway toward actually succeeding in getting passed.
And it's _certainly_ better than the Instant Runoff Voting system that Maine just adopted.
Clay Shentrup Co-founder, The Center for Election Science