Hello Robert

Well, I see you are more than an enthusiastic supporter of RCV. You are in the mud, getting hands dirty, challenging people want to see RCV fail. I wish you all the best in your advocacy.

I had a Medium acquaintance from Alaska. She did not like voting in RCV, but could not explain why. I told her she needed only mark 1, 2, 3. Other than that, I did not encounter how RCV has been doing in Maine and Alaska.

I will just offer my experience with electoral change in Canada, where we have paper ballots. In 2000, the federal government instituted voter ID before getting a ballot. The reason: the parties were sending partisans to represent people who were unlikely to vote. Good canvassing can figure this out.

THe first election was a bit of a mess. The government put the message out there and out there. Yet many people were still surprised at being asked for ID. Most had some ID handy. But some did not. Let's just say that there was a lot griping when some people had to go back home to get ID.

The provinces and municipalities followed with this new rule. It took about 3-4 elections before Canadians understood to bring ID to the voting booth. Now, it is a normal process. No one questions it any more.

Moral: It takes a while for people to get used to electoral changes-----even simple changes.

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Having counted simple paper ballots at internal party elections, I found it amazing at how some people will screw that up. Maybe 2%.

I can see a few election cycles will be needed to get 95% of voters putting their 1, 2, 3 in the order they want.

Then there are the poll workers. It will take a few elections AND I JUST FIGURED OUT A BIG FLAW WITH RCV.

With plurality voting, the poll workers can easily count and report the ballots at the poll, within an hour after the poll close. Each poll reports to head teller, who tallies the results to find a pluralistic winner.

But with RCV, the poll workers cannot proceed to the next round of counting until the head teller tells them which candidate(s) has been dropped. This will lengthen the time of counting ballots. Poll workers should expect to stay at poll until midnight if several rounds of recounting are required.

I'll have to think about this some more. Maybe Australia has some good procedures in place.

And you Americans like your voting machines. This process could be automated. But again, several election cycles will be needed to make the process smooth.