BC perplexingly chose otherwise. People always seem to hate this. Even here in California, we’re lucky to be able to rank everyone in SF but few other cities can. And every election, there’s a lot of “IRV is ruining this city” when candidates with fewer first choice votes win.
Alaska got Ranked Choice Voting and after every election cycle where a Democrat wins they're up in arms about how it's bad. This time the repeal effort got within a whisker of succeeding, while the Democrat (Mary Peltola) lost her congressional seat.
RCV encourages moderation, meaning candidates like Peltola and Senator Murkowski (R) win statewide office. This distresses people who feel like such moderates are very far from their own views.
Ranked choice isn't the only alternative voting system that encourages moderation. Approval voting is vastly simpler to understand and implement and also accomplishes many of the same benefits.
Simplicity is an underrated value when it comes to elections. People are more likely to trust that which they can easily understand. And ranked choice, fairly or not tends to cause a lot of confusion.
Unfortunately, I rarely see people who hate IRV/RCV because they want it replaced with approval voting. Usually it's that their candidate/party of choice would fare worse under it.
But they know they live in a state where any presidential candidate with (R) next to their name can win by 10-20 points. So they wonder how such a state can elect a Democrat without something underhanded going on. A working theory is that the RCV system is "too confusing" for some folks and it leads to the D candidate winning an "undeserved" victory.
The Duchess of Alaska is a "moderate" only insofar as her first and overriding loyalty is to the what the permanent Federal Civil Service in DC wants. She'll agree with anyone of any ideological stripe so long as she knows the will of the bureaucracy is being carried out.
I hear you and this is such a lazy argument against IRV. Do they really lack the imagination to understand why this is a feature, not a bug in IRV?
IRV, though imperfect, is so clearly superior to one candidate voting if the goal is a responsive democracy. Unfortunately, there are many people who don't want that. IRV closes a loophole for extreme candidates (I have a strong suspicion that the 2016 djt campaign would have been thwarted by IRV had the gop primary used it). It also allows partially aligned challengers to pressure incumbents without dividing the electorate. This would likely be better for the challenger and the incumbent. Consider this past election where Jill Stein was demonized as a spoiler, which she potentially was, but would not have been in ranked choice. I bet there are a lot of voters who would have rather voted for Jill Stein but instead cast their vote for a candidate whom they thought could win (including candidates who received what should have been Jill Stein votes and thus lost important information about what matters to their voters). This is bad for everyone except those who don't believe in responsive democracy and largely rewards career politicians, political consultants and lobbyists.
