venta

Condorcet is great provided that you want to strengthen candidates with high levels of approval. But I dread to think what the "you're too stupid for AV: vote against it" mob would make of it. In a sense the electorate doesn't *need* to understand it, since it doesn't really need to affect how they vote. One impression I get from the campaign though is that a reasonable proportion of people don't want to feel that the electoral system is arcane. Or at least, the No campaign believes that to be the case. It's fair to want people to understand why the winner won, although my preferred means of achieving that would be to explain any new system rather than to reject it!

Aside from correcting a "tactical" preference back to a "pure" preference in the final round, I think a psychological reason why people might express preferences in a runoff that they don't express in IRV is that IRV doesn't let you express a preference for "whichever one of X or Y" over "Z" unless you can express either a preference for X over Y, or Y over X.

So you can't say what many voters think, which is, "my preferences, followed by everybody else equal, followed by the fascists" (or communists, as the case may be). People might be discouraged from expressing arbitrary preferences in order to strengthen a negative preference, although rationally speaking they should probably just toss a coin or something.