Dunno, it sounds to me like what the British and French elections show is that you don’t defeat a growing the far right with the same neo-liberals who created the material conditions for the right to take hold.
Everybody in Ireland loves our single-transferable vote. Any we moan about everything.
I don’t see any flaw. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot better than first past the post.
The flaw is that you could just do it all in one round with ranked choice instead of having runoff elections and/or tactical voting.
Having runoff elections allows for another round of campaigning and the voters can make a more informed choice given the results of the first round. There is some value in that, but personally I’d lean towards instant runoff or just proportional representation etc.
That value of continued campaigns should be weighed against the requirement that voters need to vote multiple times. Depending on how the votes are cast (in-person vs. mail-in, precinct-based vs. county-based, etc.), subsequent rounds of voting would likely see diminishing voter turnout.
Look at Arrow’s theorem, perfect voting system cannot exist. And if you want user friendly voting system with understandable rules, it gets further from ideal.
In practice, FPTP is not actually user-friendly either. Unless you’re lucky enough that you genuinely do just want to vote for whichever of the two big candidates you’re presented with, you either vote tactically (a decision nobody enjoys taking) or you accept an extremely high likelihood of your vote being effectively wasted. Even if the actual process of putting a mark next to one candidate is simple, the decision process leading up to that is significantly complicated beyond the necessary “work out who you like”
You could pick literally any of the alternatives and it would be better than FPTP. There’s nothing difficult about ranking candidates; Australians have done it for around 100 years.
I was going to downvote for all caps. But then I checked and the actual title is in all caps, so touché.
But actually I think I’m going to downvote anyway because seriously fuck that. Nothing personal.