That contradicts my own experience. I suspect you have mischaracterized your own experience. Do you have a close connection to one of the major political parties?
Nope, no “close connections”.
We simply tried different voting methods as a means to arrive at a choice for a slogan for a project. Most people were unhappy with the results of the “alternative methods”. The methods we tried tended to select the one we disliked least, rather than the one we all liked most. We spent some time looking at different selection (voting) methods over a week, maybe two.
People push “alternative methods” when their choice can’t win a straight vote, else why push for the alternative? I ran across this when we were trying to site an alternative energy project. After we had picked a place (a co-generation plant) people came out of the woodwork with “alternative voting methods” because they didn’t like the final choice. They wanted a re-vote using various other techniques that they clearly felt would result in placing the project somewhere else than what we’d picked (or why complain about the method we used?).
RCV voting does in fact yield suboptimum results, while it LOOKS like it would give you the best results.
There are two problems with RCV. The first is the “kook vote” problem. If you have a system with RCV, you get crazy people running for office, and they have a dedicated following of crazy voters who will come out. But having come out, they WILL tend to make 2nd and 3rd choices, and those choices will also be the craziest choices.
These are voters who wouldn’t bother to come out just to pick from two or three major candidates, but their combined effect can pick the least useful candidate.
The 2nd problem is more of a statistical one, which is that while we can rank people 1,2,3, those rankings don’t give us absolute valuations, just relative ones.
I might really love one candidate, and then struggle to choose between number 2 and number 3; if I was ranking using a 100-point total, I might say my candidates were 95,3, and 2.
But maybe lots of people find that two candidates are about the same, and the 3rd is useless. They might do 50-49-1.
Well, if I was one of those 50-49-1 people, and it turned out that my “1” was going to win because of other votes, I could easily be swayed to change from my 50 to my 49 in order to get my 49 elected instead of the ‘1’.
But in a simple ranking system, my 49 might get eliminated first, and then my 50.
This suggests a better solution is to provide a numeric value like “100”, and allow people to assign numbers to candidates.
But it turns out that one of the best ways to handle this is to have a 2nd full vote if nobody gets the 50% on the 1st ballot, and only then would you start eliminating the worst performer, but have ANOTHER vote after each is eliminated.
This allows people to change their vote to maximise the chance that a candidate they can tolerate ends up winning.