Ranked choice allows for a middle ground to form independently of the parties at the outer fringes - it doesn't necessarily mean the centre wins, but it does exist and have a chance.
Veritasium video on voting systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
https://electionscience.org/research-hub/the-limits-of-ranke...
In a century of voting none of the niggling complaints made in your second link (I read rather than watched) has been an issue and such system are better than the shortcomings of FPP such as takes place in much of the US.
Point 5: What RCV Doesn’t Do: Help Third Parties seems exceptionally on the nose.
eg: "RCV’s complex tabulations don’t show support for candidates’ rankings once a candidate is eliminated." .. well, they do if the electrol commission reports them (as is done in Australia).
"Also, according to Duverger’s Law (a political science concept), a voting method needs to have at least one of two features to encourage third parties. It needs to either (1) have a lower vote count threshold for a candidate to be elected or (2) allow voters to honestly support their favorite. RCV does neither of these things."
In the US, for example, Australian preferential voting would allow for votes to Jill Stein to not spoil the vote for the proper majors (Biden | Trump) and report how many voters actually support Stein Vs Biden or Trump.
Those who wish can vote [ 1: Stein 2: Biden ] or [ 1: Stein 2: Trump ] and (if that's how it goes) if Stein loses by having less votes then the preferences go to each ballots 2: candidate.
After all is done then the winner, be it Trump or Biden, is aware of just how much they owe to voters that preferred Stein and over the course of time the support for Stein can grow AND|OR alternative candidates can move to embrace the policy positions of Stein if they're seen to be significantly popular.
The impatient and unconstrained may prefer to vote with their feet for those places where the middle ground has not yet been stomped out of existence.
My only guess is that people really want to say, "This one is my favorite, followed by..." instead of saying, "These ones are acceptable", but there are some real downsides to that.
In the US, we've had several states play games when it comes to counting and reporting votes. With ranked choice, these places could cause uncertainty for weeks. With approval voting, a clear winner can be known if there is one.
All politicians put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what positions will appeal to voters, and assemble a coalition large enough to eke out a majority. It won't be as simple as "adding policy positions from Candidate X and gain their voters". Every policy position change attracts some people and loses others.
People seem to hope that an alternative voting system will turn up some massive groundswell of support for their specific policy, that is somehow being ignored solely because of first-past-the-post voting. That's simply not the case.
Stein's policies just aren't all that popular. Maybe they're more popular than you might infer from the vote total, but that's not what a vote is for. A vote's job is to determine a sole winner. For making finer distinctions, there are many better tools -- focus groups, polling, reading social media -- and they do indeed do that.
I don't care. I'm in Australia with preferential voting refuting the GP comments position.
> All politicians put a lot of effort into trying to figure out what positions will appeal to voters
Sure. Phone polls that now (in the US) fewer than 1% respond to and have huge selection bias issues. Internet polls that are riddled with issues. etc.
> A vote's job is to determine a sole winner.
In the US. Within an antiquated electoral system that has iteratively doom spiraled into a two party quagmire despite the founders express dislike of party politics.
That's exactly the kind of blinkered view expected of a First Past the Post voter raised with American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
Our system was established in 1900 - it has its issues, sure, but it was designed with in intent as a "Washminster system" that looked at both the UK and US systems and attempted to take the best of both and iron out some of the glaring issues with each.
> Voting is not the only way that people let their preferences be known.
But it's certainly the most on record, definitive, and breaks up Two Party non representative majority blocks, forces deals with smaller but still representative blocks, etc.
Now I'm watching the train wreck safely, from a proportional representation polity.
wrt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885514 compare a previous swap: https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce... !
* I hear the DPRK would give their POWs chocolate bars if they wrote politically correct essays; similarly when I was young I used to get "gold stars" for writing essays about how obviously N=2 parties must be better than, not only N=1, but also N>=3.
(thus far we've been able to avoid the major objection in that thread, by keeping a nearly continuous "grand coalition" government: proportional all the way up)
[we're also helped because political boundaries are not arbitrarily redrawn, but tend to be based on centuries-to-millennia-old borders; I don't know what they do in the cities, but it's undoubtedly better than Austin TX: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/new-district-maps... ]
In the annals of N>=3, one of my favourite truple slogans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Democrats#:~:text=A....
Third and fourth parties that can't spoil are a blessing in electoral systems, they force deals in the direction of real people and increase representation.