How could it not? Genuinely asking.
"One problem of RCV is that especially with lots of candidates, a winner can be chosen with a relatively small number of first-place votes. This was exactly what happened in the city of Oakland, California, in 2010 when Jean Quan, who received only 24 percent of votes in the first round, ended up winning the election because she was the second and third choice of many voters. In Burlington, Vermont, after the leader in the first round did not win an election, RCV was repealed."
It might be a technical majority, but when so few people actually preferred the candidate that won, it makes sense that they repealed it.
The benefit of the simple plurality is that you've got to actually get people to want you.
Not sure what I think about RCV, personally.
At the end of the day, no one cares how we decide our leaders so long as their candidate wins. And when their candidate loses, that's when there are suddenly massive flaws in the process.
Imagine a system where each person gets 100 votes to allot as they wish. Say I give 97 votes to A, 2 to B, and 1 to C, while you give 35 votes to A, 33 to B, and 32 to C.
If we instead had an RCV system, we'd perhaps both express those votes as "A over B over C", even though under the vote-allotment system we were expressing pretty divergent opinions. I clearly find candidate B unacceptable, if barely more tolerable than C, where you appear to find all three of them more or less acceptable.
In Austriala the above happens all the time it is considered normal.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/guide/mpor/
Here the Labor party candidate polled second highest (with 27%) and was elected thanks to Green Preferences. The Liberal candidate lost despite polling 42% of first preference votes.
The "bayesian regret" is almost as good as RCV, but it's much simpler and doesn't suffer from the misperception you highlighted.
Approval Voting is not problematic for situations where you don't need ballot secrecy and approving is, e.g., a binding commitment to participate if the approved option is selected (or where non-approval is a binding opt-out), or where some other consistent concrete consequence of approval exists.
A similar problem exists with most numerical rating (as opposed to ordinal ranking) methods, and to other ranking methods with smiller number of rankings than alternatives, and, perhaps, to a much lesser extent, to ranking systems that allow (but don't require) equal rankings.
Because most analyses silently assume a consistent the mapping from an internal utility function to ballot marking, this is frequently overlooked.
E.g. in the extreme case, with three candidates, suppose everyone hated the other two options so much that they refused to even write in a #2 choice.
Of course, this seems like a completely silly argument, because it's much more likely to generate majorities than the single-choice system.
Personally, I don't mind if someone wins with 43% of the popular vote. I don't even mind FPTP much, and yes, I mostly vote third party. But from other people in the state, that 50% number was a concern, and I don't think this addressed that adequately.
I voted against the initiative, mostly because as I understand it, it still doesn't necessarily create majority candidates and because there's a good chance it's in violation of the state constitution.
I don't mind that it passed though.