Election Reform, IRV and Politics

I don't like Instant Runoff Voting, but I'm a little sad that Burlington VT repealed IRV election of their mayor. Sure, their second IRV run election was a flop, where three different counting methods could find three different winners, demonstrating that all of the anti-IRV FUD, dismissed as vaguely possible mathematical oddities, could actually happen in the real world. Still, I'm a little sad.

I want to see 'election reform', even if it's IRV, go forward and spread. I'll yell and scream at every stage I can that if we're going to do it we should do it right and use something better than IRV, but if that's the compromise I get I'll take it. And I'm afraid that because Burlington had a bad experience with 'election reform' (really all IRV's fault, IMFO), all such efforts will be tarnished. Every establishment politician who wants to raise Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt will be able to point at Burlington and make spooky noises about what terrible things could happen.

I've been focusing on redistricting lately, because programming that has been the more interesting puzzle and because the 2010 Census is making it timely, but I still think that getting people voting on rankings and ratings ballots could be the biggest thing to happen to Democracy since the US Constitution. Making that change may have just gotten a little harder because some people did it badly. (Which does not bode well for the current pretty-bad-compromise Health Care bill. :-/ )