Both are miles beyond first past the post, and both scare many people just because it's something new and different.
Hopefully you can support any change locally that gets us off of first past the post. Once we get some voting changes, hopefully that makes future changes even easier to make... though I know that's wishful thinking.
Actually, that's debatable. There was an interesting simulation done awhile back [1] that compared voting systems, and they found that if people voted honestly then IRV is better, but if people vote strategically the result isn't any more democratically optimal than FPTP. Which is what we should probably expect to happen when voters figure out that it's only safe to put your first choice first when they're the overwhelming favorite to win or they have no hope of winning. Otherwise it's complicated: you could cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them too high.
Obviously this is one simulation and results would be different with different assumptions. But I think it's worth pushing back on the idea that IRV is way better. It solves the problem of minor candidates being spoilers, but what if people actually start voting for minor candidates and they become major candidates? With 3 or more major candidates IRV starts looking like not such a great system.
The problem with talking about this is that the problems with FPTP are readily apparent and easy to explain. The problems with IRV aren't obvious and are harder to explain.
But minor candidates being spoilers have come up at all levels of elections many times for decades.
Splitting the vote happens frequently, again at all levels of elections (at least nationally in terms of the primaries for US Presidents).
If you vote for your favorite candidate, and your candidate is not the last-ranked candidate, you cannot cause your candidate to lose by putting them first.
But it sounds like you’d agree that FPTP needs to go. Great, me too. That’s the real focus for me: let’s start using different methods that eliminate, even to small degrees, the problems of FPTP.
I do agree that FPTP needs to go. I'm worried though that replacing it with RCV substitutes problems we know and understand with another set of problems that we don't know to be worried about because we haven't experienced them yet.
> If you vote for your favorite candidate, and your candidate is not the last-ranked candidate, you cannot cause your candidate to lose by putting them first.
Wikipedia has an example. (Technically it's two voters difference, since a change of one voter's vote would, I think, change the result at most from a win to a tie.)
Hopefully you can support any change locally that gets us off of first past the post. Once we get some voting changes, hopefully that makes future changes even easier to make... though I know that's wishful thinking.