Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order.
This is very demonstrably false, both theoretically and in the real world. Ranked choice voting only solves the spoiler effect in cases where the spoiler candidate has a small enough amount of support as to be rendered non-competitive, but if you have more than two candidates who are competitive then the spoiler effect comes back in full force. This is not just theoretical; it happened in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election, and fallout from that election led to ranked choice being repealed shortly afterward.
So, not only does ranked choice still incentive strategic voting sometimes, but it does it in a way that is harder to see and understand. There are other non-ranked voting systems like approval voting and score voting that are much simpler and better in this respect.
Ranked choice also has other drawbacks - like violating the monotonicity criterion - as well as more practical issues like making it impossible to distribute the counting process across precincts.
No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting.
This is also quite incorrect. Our current system of first-past-the-post is bad, yeah, but there are plenty of valid arguments against ranked choice and - in my opinion - there are much better systems we could choose instead.
From the article you discussed on wiki (Burlington 2009 mayoral race)
> In IRV, there is no tactical incentive for a voter withhold or falsify their second choice.
We can get into the weeds about mathematical details like Monotonicity and Condorcet, but the truth of the matter is that nearly all the time (much more often than First-past-the-post) these measures end up being identical anyway.
I don't think anyone would argue that first-past-the-post would have produced a better candidate in this election than RCV did.
The statement "there is no tactical incentive for a voter withhold or falsify their second choice" says nothing about a voter falsifying their first choice, which is exactly where IRV broke down in that election. If Republican voters who preferred the Democrat to the Progressive candidate had falsely specified the Democrat as their first choice, they could have changed the election outcome in favor of a candidate they would have preferred over the winner that IRV elected.
I don't think anyone would argue that first-past-the-post would have produced a better candidate in this election than RCV did.
I don't think so either, but I also think that's a straw man argument. The Condorcet winner would've been the Democrat. IRV elected the Progressive, but according to that same Wiki page FPTP would have likely elected the Republican, whereas the Democrat would have likely won under systems like approval or score.
It's a tricky example because the Republican was effectively the third party candidate in that election. But once you realize that, the spoiler effect is very easy to see; the Republicans would have mostly preferred the more centrist Democrat candidate over the progressive Independent candidate, and if they had strategically ranked the Democrat first on their ballots the Democrat would have won.
By voting honestly and putting their favorite candidate first, they screwed themselves over and threw away their vote, and were understandably bitter about it given that ranked choice is frequently claimed to solve this exact problem.
I agree that Burlington is overweighted, but I also wonder: we know about Burlington because in the US, jurisdictions typically make data available down to the level of how many times each rank-order was voted. Does Australia do this? Or is it possible that Burlington-like paradoxes have happened that we just don't know about, because we've only seen the tabulation-level data?
Australia also uses proportional representation (STV) which is quite different from the winner-takes-all instant-runoff elections that are being referred to as "ranked choice" in the US.
The advantage that RCV -- at least exhaustive RCV -- has over other systems is that by forcing a ranking, you prevent a collapse back to FPTP.
In approval voting, score voting, range voting etc, parties can and will push their voters to effectively "just vote 1".
This isn't a hypothetical -- it happened in Queensland, Australia when they switched from exhaustive preferential to optional preferential voting (you could rank any number of candidates, rather than having to rank all candidates). The Labor party campaigned on "Just Vote 1" and destroyed the Liberal-National Coalition at that election. Those parties in Queensland then had to merge to offset the effect on their primary votes. In turn that caused the separate Liberal and National party caucuses in the Federal parliament to merge into a single caucus (otherwise there'd be three party rooms). That in turn greatly strengthened the power of hard-right Liberals in the selection of Prime Minister. It's been fairly fucked ever since.
There are better voting systems on paper, but typically those theories don't account for political parties actively misleading voters about how the voting system works.
This is very demonstrably false, both theoretically and in the real world. Ranked choice voting only solves the spoiler effect in cases where the spoiler candidate has a small enough amount of support as to be rendered non-competitive, but if you have more than two candidates who are competitive then the spoiler effect comes back in full force. This is not just theoretical; it happened in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election, and fallout from that election led to ranked choice being repealed shortly afterward.
So, not only does ranked choice still incentive strategic voting sometimes, but it does it in a way that is harder to see and understand. There are other non-ranked voting systems like approval voting and score voting that are much simpler and better in this respect.
Ranked choice also has other drawbacks - like violating the monotonicity criterion - as well as more practical issues like making it impossible to distribute the counting process across precincts.
No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting.
This is also quite incorrect. Our current system of first-past-the-post is bad, yeah, but there are plenty of valid arguments against ranked choice and - in my opinion - there are much better systems we could choose instead.