First, Ranked Choice is not a single election strategy; it depends how you handle the case when your top choice is not elected. You are probably thinking of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), where the bottom choice is eliminated and everyone who picked that candidate as their top choice gets their votes transferred to their next choices respectively.

IRV is better than our current system, but not by that much. Range (aka Score) Voting -- where you give each candidate a score from 1-10, like a judge in the olympics -- is much better. http://rangevoting.org/ (alias: http://scorevoting.net/) has a wealth of information on this topic, albeit in a website straight outta 2005.

These are all great points. In some cases, ballot initiatives offer some hope. Check out Represent.US - they're using ballot initiatives to push for things voters support but elected leaders often don't.

Check out California to see the sheer lunacy of the ballot system in action. Voter apathy combined with an incredibly uninformed voting population, and on top of that the inability to make any political modifications to a prop once it's passed? Yeah. Brilliant plan for populism, but otherwise not so good.

It gave us prop 8, written deliberately confusing to sway the vote. It gave us prop 47, which was a truckload of measures, many good, some horrible. Resulting in a huge increase in property crimes, which was a side effect that you'd only realize if you actually read the damn thing instead of the summary. Voters don't have that attention span. It gave us prop 69, essentially a state-run DNA database - into which you're entered on arrest instead of conviction. Because "but the children" always sells.

Or Brexit where people voted as a sign of protest, not because they wanted it. People who voted for it were surprised it passed.

"The notion that many people who voted "Leave" in the EU referendum now regret their vote because they didn't think "Leave" would win or they didn't realise the consequences of leaving the Single Market would be so bad." [1]

I think many of the problems of representative democracy stem from the fact that people don't read the bills, and they dont check their representatives voting history. Direct democracy seems much worse in that regard.

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/brexit-vote-regret-leave-marg...

Edit: added additional thought

These are great suggestions, but they beg the question of how do we achieve some form of limited direct democracy?

Arguably, we don't. The people who are currently supported by representative democracy wouldn't like that to happen. Having direct democracy with instant recall of delegates will likely not be accomplished any time soon, due to "the powers that be" lobbying against it. And if it ever were to succeed, they'd up the advertising game to mislead and misinform people more than is already done.

Perhaps I am cynical, but I do not believe that a system which benefits the average person, the vast majority, can be accomplished in a system where the profit motive exists which is in most cases a direct contravention to the long-term wills of humanity, that is, our safe continued existence, and maintaining a relatively free way of life.

Edit: also worth looking at what has happened with previous campaigns to make the voting system fairer; in the the UK, the alternative vote referendum was opposed by those parties which drew large gains from FPTP, namely the Conservative Party. Their website compared the AV to a system in which your child wins an egg and spoon race, but he isn't given the trophy.