Having read the comments to the whole article, and having followed the link to the range voting web page, I am less sold on IRV than I was a few minutes ago. It would still be an improvement over the antiquated majoritarian method used in most elections, but if you're going to propose something entirely new, it might as well be the best option, so why not propose Range Voting?

Yeah, I just learned about range voting myself. The comments suggesting range voting were posted after I posted here. But either way, I think that it would enfranchise more people and therefore strengthen the party.

I got this link in reply to a query I sent to FairVote on this:
http://www.fairvote.org/blog/index.php/w...

Some of the comments are also arguing for Range Voting, but the blog lays out the case for IRV pretty well. I'm wondering how hard it would be to combine them.

It seems like if people "scored" candidates as in range voting, the rankings for IRV could be inferred pretty easily from that. Then we could use both methods and see if they both produce the same winner. If they don't, then we use a third method to determine the winner between those two.... or have them both serve the term together as co-chairs, co-Representatives, co-Presidents, or whatever.