I'm struggling to find a source, but I did read an article once about how some elections in Australia have fallen back to "lesser of two evils" precisely becaus

I'm struggling to find a source, but I did read an article once about how some elections in Australia have fallen back to "lesser of two evils" precisely because of the need to vote strategically in order to make sure your vote isn't spoiled. But suppose you're right and voters rank candidates honestly because they can't predict how to vote strategically; ultimately, I think that is arguably even worse, because even if voters can't predict how to vote strategically in advance, they can certainly still feel resentful after the fact when the results are tallied and it becomes clear that they got screwed over by voting honestly. At least in plurality voting, it's easy to understand the tradeoffs and choose whether you want to vote for a spoiler candidate or not. Surely it will not lead to greater voter enfranchisement for people who find out after they voted that they accidentally spoiled their own votes, and could've had a say in the outcome if they'd expressed their rankings differently. If this still all sounds hypothetical, keep in mind that this is exactly what happened in the 2009 Burlington, VT mayoral election. The Republican candidate acted as a spoiler for the Democrat (who had the broadest popular support) and instead the Democrat was eliminated and the third-party Progressive candidate was elected. This led to wide-spread dissatisfaction and IRV was repealed there in 2010.