Just to clarify, when I say "relaxed rank voting is just a restricted version of score voting", I'm talking about the ballots, not the method for evaluating the

Just to clarify, when I say "relaxed rank voting is just a restricted version of score voting", I'm talking about the ballots, not the method for evaluating the winner. As I said, those two things should be separated. I agree that "instant runoff" is a rather sub-optimal choice as an evaluation method. But once "ranked choice" ballots are established in Maine (or wherever), they could later upgrade the evaluation method to, for example, use the Schulze method[1] instead, without changing the ballots. The point is, whatever type of ballots you're using - traditional single choice, approval, ranked, relaxed ranked, or score/range - the ballots should all be converted to score/range ballots and evaluated by an optimal score/range evaluation method (probably Schulze or something like it). This also means that the ballots don't even have to be all the same type. Each voter could choose the type of ballot they feel most comfortable with, knowing that whichever type of ballot they choose, their vote will count as much as any other voter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method