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If it’s intentional by the voter it’s not a problem.
If it’s because the ballots are confusing, or the process is, it isn’t fine. They’re being partially disenfranchised- their ballot will have less power than someone who understood the process.
We have RCV in NY for primaries. Understanding the implications of how the order matters and gets counted isn’t super easy. There are definitely going to be unintended consequences for RCV.
It's not really any more disenfranchising than FPTP. While RCV has tactical voting issues, so does FPTP, and in most cases someone who doesn't understand the system is just going to vote for someone they perceive to have a chance of winning, which is very likely to be in the final two candidates. And if they're instead the type to vote for a minor candidate, their vote would have just been meaningless in FPTP anyway.
All the trivia about the very rare cases where tactical voting matters in RCV is just that, trivia. No one really needs to try to game theory their vote out, because in most cases it just doesn't matter and RCV just gives some people the ability to first declare who they actually want before sending their vote to the preferred major candidate. And in the end, people who can't figure out basic voting instructions simply aren't thinking about their vote that deeply. We're lucky if they've even familiarized themselves with all the candidates.
It's really hard for any system to be worse than FPTP. The people spreading FUD about RCV are mostly doing it because the flaws in FPTP benefit them.
It's hard for a system to be worse than FPTP.
The problem is that RCV isn't that big of an improvement on it.
For one thing, its voter satisfaction efficiency isn't great.
For another thing, in most FPTP elections, things like the spoiler effect are mere trivia, as well. The last time I voted, nearly all the races had at most two candidates and a few local ones even only had one candidate. I'm not a fan of FPTP because it leads to elections like that and handles elections with many viable candidates badly. However, it's in precisely the kind of elections I care about that RCV's flaws go from mere trivia to being far more likely.
A good voting system shouldn't need a crutch like primaries to have a high quality result. You should be able to have an election between all the 2016 presidential primary candidates without the chance of weird non-monotonic behavior being unacceptably high.
It does because their vote is potentially worth less than someone who does understand.
That’s less of an issue in FPTP except for the undervoting issue called out in the post when you have to vote for multiple candidates.
Anyone who votes for a third party candidate gets no value from their vote in FPTP. They have effectively no impact on the outcome at all. This is no worse than that and not in any way a reason not to implement RCV.
And again, this is the slimmest of edge cases for a sliver of voters. Most voters will easily adapt to the system (particularly if any effort at all is made to educate them) and even those that don't will very rarely lose their vote due to not ranking lower candidates. And those voters that would are already throwing away their vote without impacting the result in FPTP. That this is a real issue that should block RCV implementation because it's in the interest of voting fairness is A LIE.
What about the disenfranchised caused by first past the post? It’s arguably more representative even if some are partially disenfranchised.