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As others are saying, there are certainly drawbacks to IRV. I think there are theoretical results showing that all of the mainstream proposals for voting system

As others are saying, there are certainly drawbacks to IRV. I think there are theoretical results showing that all of the mainstream proposals for voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting aka “gaming” your vote, among other issues. What they aren’t acknowledging is that the situation is even worse with our current system. My personal preference is approval voting, but I’m down with all sorts of systems that are better than the status quo. I expect that anything that lets you express more of your preferences will increase buy in and participation. Increased participation with preferences closer to people’s true preferences goes hand in hand with increased legitimacy. We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

NickM 6y ago
We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better. I mostly agree with you, but I do fear that some of the hidden flaws of ranked choice could end up poisoning the well for better systems like approval voting. After 2009, Burlington switched back to FPTP, and as far as I know there have been no serious efforts to try any other alternative systems there. If massive money and effort is put into adopting RCV while people falsely claim that it solves the spoiler effect, then once the problems with RCV start to become more widely understood, people are going to be a lot more skeptical next time around when advocates of approval/score/STAR voting come around and say "okay but this time it really fixes it!"