As much as I want to see election reform, this seems like a horrific idea. It's hard enough to get people to vote, but now they have to know enough about candidates to rank them? Look, sure, for a lot of us dedicated voters / political junkies its no big thing, but for a lot of people that's way too much of a cognitive burden (I'm keeping it real here folks; it's hard enough to get them to use the privacy sleeve and sign their ballot...).
I'm also thinking in terms of what this does for incumbent vs challenger... would like to see what experts say, as it feels like votes could easily become spread across a group of challengers.
This comment is uninformed. A nice property of RCV is that an individual can choose to entirely ignore it and vote as though it were still FPTP: all you need to do is fill in exactly one box for the candidate you want and ignore the rest. There's no mandate that you rank all the candidates.
Look, I love being downvoted and called uninformed as much as the next guy, but I think perhaps you are missing the nuance of my inquiry. I see at least four different voting proposals in the above comments, so it isn't clear to me whether RCV always works as you describe - admittedly, this discussion hasn't come to my locale in a meaningful way yet, so I'm legitimately interested in understanding the various models.
I have to wonder if perhaps even in the model you are describing still overlooks the human element. Our voting system is remarkably complicated - everything from fill-in-the-bubble to poke-out-the-hole to align-the-paper-ballot, voting by mail, voting in person, etc. The first part of my inquiry was a deliberate interest in the human interaction in this kind of voting.
The second part of my inquiry seems to have been touched upon by several other commenters, regarding the math behind outcomes when this kind of voting is introduced.
>This comment is uninformed.
Perhaps leave this part out next time - the rest was helpful. You make more friends with kindness.
It's fair to be concerned about the UX of voting, especially in threads like this full of wonks who just want to debate the theoretical foundations of voting systems. In light of that I would like to assure you that the RCV intitatives that I have seen in the US that have achieved momentum have done so by fully acknowledging that FPTP originated and persists via the sheer simplicity of its implementation; these RCV campaigns see it as a point in their favor that voters can, to use programming jargon, "gracefully degrade" to FPTP to avoid the need to completely re-educate every voter about the fundamentals of voting.
I'm also thinking in terms of what this does for incumbent vs challenger... would like to see what experts say, as it feels like votes could easily become spread across a group of challengers.