But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and every method is going to result in people complaining after their preferred candidate loses but would have won using another method.
RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a subjective process, which could "poison the well" even more. When people have to worry about what it means to give a 3 vs a 4 to a candidate, or whether to approve 1 or 2 or 3 people?
Ranking candidates is an objectively accurate statement of preference (in contrast to STAR/approval which are subjective), and while instant runoff isn't perfect, it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes or people not understanding how to vote.
You can criticize RCV for sure, but if you want to defend another method, you have to show how its drawbacks aren't even worse.
it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes
I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.
I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).
I think this is the important point: some criteria are more important than others in that the societal reactions when one or another criterion is violated are not equal and could engender different outcomes.
If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that particular voting method, but there's nothing to say the results are compromised as a result. What would be way, way more troubling for the general public is being able to say "but that candidate was the clear favorite, why did the runner-up get the seat?" after the votes are counted. RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest and a skepticism of the election's results when something like the monotonicity criterion is violated, not to mention the spoiler effect is not completely eliminated under RCV.
Further I believe bounded rationality can be applied here and very many people would still take the approach of filling in more than one bubble even in "strategic" settings, because people aren't perfect rational utility-maximizing agents, and anyway I don't see an acute disadvantage of using approval voting if that's the biggest gripe people seem to have about it.
In short: think of elections in a more 21st-century-Nobel-winner sense, not in a rote 20th-century-econ-professor sense.
"Bullet voting" (voting for only one candidate) isn't usually even a smart strategy to maximize your influence in an approval voting election, despite fairvote.org's claims that it is.
Of course approval voting doesn't reduce to bullet voting, for the same reason tactical plurality voting (the status quo) isn't honest. Green supporters voting Democrat for instance.
Approval also doesn't violate favorite betrayer, which RCV does.
From a voter perspective, monotonicity and favorite betrayer seem to be two of the most important factors when determining "absurd outcomes." At least in my opinion.
> but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.
It sure does seem absurd, and so thankfully there's no case where RCV does that! :)
There seems to be a lot of misinformation thrown around about this, where people seem to be conflating different issues.
I'm not sure what your source is, but you might be misunderstanding the Favorite Betrayal Criterion... which seems counterintuitive at first but isn't really. There's a lot of noise made about the fact that moving a non-preferred candidate higher than your preferred candidate can help your preferred candidate to win... but it's actually because you're ranking your preferred candidate's main opponent even lower in the process. And also it's basically impossible to do strategically because you'd need to know how everybody else voted first.
End of story, there's nothing absurd about cadidate A winning, but if some people downranked candidate A from 2nd to 3rd rank, then that candidate would lose.
> The normalization error, what you are calling subjectivity, is already accounted for in VSE calculations.
I’d love to see an actual paper of the methodology of VSE (the FAQ is less complete than I would like, but helpful in that it shows lots of problems – for instance, while the brief description claims VSE tests elections with “voters who cluster on issues in a realistic way”, none of the descriptions of the different voter models mentions any tie to any empirical research on how voters actually cluster, instead it simply models three different, apparently chosen because of intuitive/aesthetic appeal, empirically ungrounded, abstract ideals); there are several dimensions of it which seems quite subjective/arbitrary rather than objective, making its conclusions also arbitrary, and, worse, it seems to simply ignore known effects like cultural differences in applying rating systems without concrete grounding (which effects both score-based and limited-ranks systems, but not particularly forced-preference or vote-for-one systems.)
But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and every method is going to result in people complaining after their preferred candidate loses but would have won using another method.
RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a subjective process, which could "poison the well" even more. When people have to worry about what it means to give a 3 vs a 4 to a candidate, or whether to approve 1 or 2 or 3 people?
Ranking candidates is an objectively accurate statement of preference (in contrast to STAR/approval which are subjective), and while instant runoff isn't perfect, it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes or people not understanding how to vote.
You can criticize RCV for sure, but if you want to defend another method, you have to show how its drawbacks aren't even worse.