Other people gave good answers about how this compares to RCV/IRV (thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266519#29269246 https://news.ycombinator.com/i

Other people gave good answers about how this compares to RCV/IRV (thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266519#29269246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266519#29269246), and both of the links in my first footnote above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266519#29266537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29266519#29266537) cover it. That's all academic, though. A great real example is the 2021 Seattle City Attorney primary, which had only 3 candidates. The votes were split: 36%, 32%, 30%. These 2 candidates emerged from the primary: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/us/seattle-city-attorney-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/us/seattle-city-attorney-.... The candidate that most accurately represented the opinion of the electorate, Holmes, was eliminated. That would have still happened in a ranked ballot. The voters who voted for Thomas-Kennedy or Davison in our current system would have still put Thomas-Kennedy or Davison #1 in a ranked ballot. I tried to distill this in https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1461389190206156802 https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1461389190206156802. And a 3-way race like that is actually the simplest possible case. Effects like that are much more likely with more candidates and they happen everywhere in the elimination cycle, they’re just less obvious to casual observers. That's what you see in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329 (note that IRV == RCV in that video). (Obligatory disclaimer: I don't care who wins. I do care how accurately the winners reflect the inputs, namely, voter opinion.) Separately, Washington law requires cities hold a primary that produces 2 candidates for the general election, so cities can't legally eliminate primaries. That said, whether primaries are a net positive or negative is a really complicated discussion. Beyond election mechanics, the disadvantage of primaries is that only a subset of voters in the general will turn out in the primary. The advantage is that voters don't spend much time on ballots and it focuses that time. Seattle had 15 candidates for Mayor (many races are 10+). If someone spends 10 minutes on their ballot and the ballot has 10 races, that's 1 minute per race - 6 seconds per candidate. No easy answer here. However, for practical purposes we don't need to answer that hard question; this one change delivers an incredibly representative election.