IRV isn't perfect but it's better than the current system and would encourage more independant and third party canidates to run for office as well as lead to much more interesting primaries ;)

Look, not everyone holds the perspective that you have described regarding the virtues of IRV (or "IRV", as I often put it). I have many reasons. First a little background. I began my blogging obsession in the lead-up to the 2004 "election," at repentantnadervoter.org. I even took up half their bandwidth at times (I was younger!). Many people there really regretted having voted for Nader in 2000, and it might not go too far to say they even "eviscerated" him! Not me, however. I had no penance to fulfill, having voted for Gore anyway. But I covered the spoiler effect issue up and down and every which way. It was rather fun, because there was just so much creativity that could be injected into the whole topic of "Nader Repentance." REPENT SINNER!!! It was I who exposed the many College Republicons that had injected themselves into the campus Nader Drives. I posted pictures of fat Republicon dorks sitting in on Nader panels. I dredged up many, many official memos bearing various Republicon State Party seals that begged rank and file Republicons to donate money to the Nader campaign. I PERSONALLY COINED THE TERM "SPOILER EFFECT" -- no one had used that term until well after I had begun pumping it out.

We had had a rather flamboyant Australian guy who said that "IRV" was great in the very minor ways it was used for a handful of elections in Australia. He in insisted that John Howard was serving his final days as prime minister of Australia, and was set to crow like a raven that would come upon a dead rat. We argued a bit about "IRV," and I then decided to put it to "the test." This was not so easy, as the mathematical "tests" designed to check its validity turned out to be profoundly flawed. (I do a lot of stuff in Mathematical logic and linguistics.) I found the only valid way to check for its validity was to run endless brute-force attacks on "IRV" scenarios.

The number and viability of subtle, yet pervasive, ways for "election hackers" to create security holes in all forms of "IRV" stunned me. And I began the search for a reasonably simple, stable version of "IRV" that could withstand brute-force assaults. I found none. I also found that "IRV" was advocacy was being generously supported by The Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Carnegie Mellon Foundation. So, I reluctantly concluded that "IRV" was essentially a trap that would doom all other viable efforts to institute any spoiler effect neutralizing election methods. It was depressing. And probably hundreds of Green Party, or semi-Green advocates had by this time been 100% sold on the amazingly attractive, yet nearly useless "IRV" methods.

So, below, I repost what I see as one of the best explanations of a method that can actually completely overcome the baleful consequences of the spoiler effect, which I call the Black Hat Syndrome these days. Here it is:

There are so many reasons why, in this age of coordinated electronic propaganda, democracy just doesn't work. First of all, as I have said so often, it is totally foolish to believe that people who are one paycheck away from starvation would be permitted to wield the real power of the vote when their electronic media environment is owned by a few multi-billionaires. Ask yourself "Would that be possible?" Or try this more difficult one: "Can pigs fly?"

Our plurality voting system extracts 99% of the decision making power of the voters. If you would like to vote for a White Hat, say Nader, but there is a Gray Hat, say Kerry, and a Black Hat, say Bush, in the contest, you would be suicidal to vote for the White Hat. So you are screwed.

Some misled people think IRV voting will help. It never has, never will, be helpful. As I have pointed out before, there are an infinite number of different methods for counting the ranked ballots of IRV, and the best of them require that specific information about every ballot bust be conveyed into one location, one computational funnel. And the the computation of the vote is exceedingly intricate for the best methods of counting. Moreover, you will still need to give your first rank vote to a Gray Hat, If a Black hat is present in the contest.

All these woes disappear if you just have three distinct runoffs for each election. The first runoff is an approval election that narrows the field to, say, eight candidates. With the approval method, each voter can cast just one ballot for each potential candidate that she or he approves of. There would need to be some practical limit on the number of people each voter could give one vote to, maybe 20, since we can't deal with lists bearing thousands of names. The second runoff, in which each voter could give just one vote to as many of the remaining eight as she or he wishes, would narrow the field to just the two candidates who get the most votes. The third and final runoff would be simply a race between those two candidates. I would suggest that, for each runoff, the voting could be allowed to run over a span of three days. The ballots would be hand-marked, and hand-counted by randomly drafted citizens, with each day's results announces at each polling station on the morning after that day's voting. I would give the citizens a week to deliberate between each runoff, so there would be three days for the first runoff, plus a week, the same time for the second runoff, then three days to complete the final runoff. Such a procedure of consecutive runoff approval voting would ensure that the citizens would feel that they would be making real and serious decisions.

I think most readers will walk away with the feeling that Condorcet methods are better than IRV, but with no clear idea of which Condorcet method is the best.

Half of Congress thinks evolution is a trick of Satan, so I can't really imagine them coming up with a good, informed choice between the "Smith/Minimax" and "cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping" algorithms for counting the national vote.

My brother is something of an expert on voting systems; he has an excellent essay on his LJ on why IRV is actually worse than our current plurality system.  He also explains Approval Voting, one of the simplest forms of Condorcet system and a viable alternative to IRV and plurality.  I think his piece is significantly easier to follow than the Wikipedia article hoose mentioned.