Waaaay too late, but I come bearing news from 2024: the strategy was super easy for people to figure out. Democrats used it in the Alaska 2022 Senate race, where they intentionally sandbagged their own candidates to make sure none of them eliminated Lisa Murkowski.
In fact, the strategy of IRV is exactly the same as in FPP with a primary. (Because they’re basically the same system!) In round 1, your goal is to back the most electable candidate in your party to help them make it to the general, where they’ll win. So you need to find an electable moderate and put them at the top of your ballot. (But not too moderate, or the payoff is too low.)
Alternatively, you can use the opposite strategy, called raiding: find the worst candidate from the opposite coalition and support them. Then, in the final round, your party has an unelectable extremist as their opponent.
Security mindset, people! “I didn’t manage to work out how to vote strategically in the 20 seconds I spent thinking about it” is not “tactical voting is impossible”.
Waaaay too late, but I come bearing news from 2024: the strategy was super easy for people to figure out. Democrats used it in the Alaska 2022 Senate race, where they intentionally sandbagged their own candidates to make sure none of them eliminated Lisa Murkowski.
In fact, the strategy of IRV is exactly the same as in FPP with a primary. (Because they’re basically the same system!) In round 1, your goal is to back the most electable candidate in your party to help them make it to the general, where they’ll win. So you need to find an electable moderate and put them at the top of your ballot. (But not too moderate, or the payoff is too low.)
Alternatively, you can use the opposite strategy, called raiding: find the worst candidate from the opposite coalition and support them. Then, in the final round, your party has an unelectable extremist as their opponent.
Security mindset, people! “I didn’t manage to work out how to vote strategically in the 20 seconds I spent thinking about it” is not “tactical voting is impossible”.