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’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.