Generally if you put someone above your ‘2 party preferred’ candidate either your vote flows down or it was irrelevant.
Was it razor thin on first preference then the bottom 2 or 3 crackpots sealing the deal? This is the only way I can think of that’wasted vote’ happening.
A wins a plurality of first preference votes. Otherwise, voters are split between B and C. We assume that if a candidate places C as their first preference, they will place B as their second preference, and vice-versa.
In this scenario, whoever gets more first preference votes out of B and C will win the election since the other will place third and get knocked out of the race, so anybody who placed A as their first preference didn't get to express whether they'd prefer B or C.
If it wasn't obvious,
A: LNP
B/C: Labor/Greens
https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/guide/bri...
The point is that A voters arguably should have voted such that they could influence which of these two candidates won. This would require 'lying' about which candidate is their favourite; i.e. strategic voting
To clarify what I meant, with FPTP you have to be quite tactical because of how that system fundamentally works.
With Ranked Choice the effect and likelihood is far less. Importantly the second order effects are meaningful. Even if your vote was exhausted it still captures your opinion, and can influence the next election because you can record your opinion for others to see.
With FPTP, we don’t record everyone’s opinion on who is best suited for office, rather we record who you think everyone thinks will win (else your vote can be wasted or work against your intent).
IMHO if you need to vote strategically with Ranked Choice, it’s implementation has been warped and needs to be improved.
Like everything brevity is required before you can dive into the nuance. Perhaps a better way to describe ranked choice is that you can’t waste your vote like you can with FPTP.
Wasting a vote has a much more specific meaning than the general usage I come across, which complicates this more. [0]
I don’t think it’s a losing battle. If anything the last Australian federal election showed not only how good Ranked Choice is at conveying voter intention, but that a meaningful number of us understand it.
The LNP stopped representing their base (perhaps in a similar way to the ALP with the Greens) which opened the door for the Teal independents.
As an outsider looking in to US politics it appears as though similar issues exist, but there are no viable alternatives. In a positive sign for democracy US voters largely rejected candidates who were sowing doubt about the elections.
Related this thread [0] is a nice dive into the changing political landscape around the world as we age. It’s not following the expected path, and I think a lot has to do with us being more educated than ever.
[0] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323?...
However, I don't particularly like the way we talk about it. I've heard a lot of people say things like, "You can't waste your vote." This is frankly untrue and there were even examples in the last election where certain voters could have voted strategically (e.g. by not making their favourite candidate their first preference).