Honest question: are you speaking from direct experience of RCV here? To me, the question of "which of these is your favorite" and "put these in order according to which is your favorite" is pretty simple. Most scenarios of "surprise" winners seem either contrived, or not very surprising.

I am very interested in the amount of negative sentiment to RCV in the zeitgeist and am trying to determine if it is coming from lived experience of issues with the voting system or from somewhere else....

I have participated, however, my candidate was not going to win and the eventual winner was not my choice. Admittedly even in a FPTP, my candidate would lose, so no diff. That said, there have been scenarios such as described here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/12/12/opinion/no-it-threate... and here: https://www.deseret.com/2023/1/9/23518790/voter-confusion-gr... among other places.

You may disagree with that take and say it only happens sometimes. I think we can at least agree it's not settled that it results in better election cycles.

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing! And yes, I 100% agree that more data is needed before drawing broad conclusions regarding the effectiveness of RCV (particularly when compared to FPTP).

I found the discussion in the Deseret piece regarding how the result of the Alaska senatorial election seemed "unintuitive" to many voters to be very interesting! When I look at the numbers and results in that election is seems clear that the outcome is exactly what I would hope to see (and seemingly is a text-book case of RCV in action). But alas, when you deploy to production, things rarely go as planned and it is clear that I need to give more weight to the human element in all of this. Even if the results are statistically desirable, that does not mean that voters will actually feel good about the result of the election....

Assertions like this need to be challenged. So, with no more explanation than you offered, I challenge this claim and offer an equally baseless assertion.

It works in a super intuitive way that leads to the least dissatisfaction among voters.