Thanks for mentioning this report, Rob. It's very long, about 6500 words not counting footnotes, but has a lot of very useful detail and is very well written. I recommend it to everyone interested in the current politics of election reform in the U.S., even if you're opposed to IRV, as I am, and favor Condorcet, approval voting, and other election methods over IRV. The article also helps make clear why IRV, despite its shortcomings, is still far better than plurality voting, which IRV advocates have failed to convincingly enough explain to voters and which in turn is the main reason IRV was rejected by voters in 2024 except in DC and, just barely, Alaska. One of article's weaknesses is that it lumps top two and other top-N methods together as similar kinds of reforms and says nothing about why the spoiler problem is especially problematic with top two but increasingly less so with other top-N methods and how how approval voting would produce much better top-N methods. It also says nothing about Condorcet and other ranked voting methods or about approval and other alternative non-ranking methods. However, there has been so little effective advocacy of Condorcet and other methods in the U.S. that the author had little reason to mention them, especially since he was focused on methods that have been widely advocated and voted on in recent referendums and by state legislators. Including a discussion of alternatives to IRV and alternative top-N and other methods would have required either a much longer and more complicated article or a separate article. I'm copying this to the Brookings email address, so maybe the author, Darrell M. West, will consider writing a separate article. If he reads this and may consider writing a separate article, I strongly urge him to write to Rob. -Ralph Suter On 5/20/2025 3:01 PM, election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com wrote: Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 19 May 2025 15:30:17 -0700 > From: Rob Lanphier<roblan@gmail.com> > To:election-methods@lists.electorama.com > Subject: [EM] December 2024 report: "The future of the instant runoff > election reform" > Message-ID: > <CAK9hOYknuSJ5Oce+1peVHw71yaGzBkapctXO84PzQ2AE4Zv_1Q@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Hi folks, > > I thought y'all might be interested in this report from Brookings: > https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-future-of-the-instant-runoff-election-reform/ > > I'm curious what y'all think of the report.