Can someone comment on whether this really does what we want it to do?
I recall reading that a similar system in Australia (or New Zealand or somewhere) didn’t enable third party candidates at all, which was explain because of something something math.
Ranked choice voting systems are still ordinal voting systems, just like first past the post. Which means it's still susceptible to similar kinds of strategic voting as the current system. Although it obscures them from being usable via common sense, I don't think it prevents algorithms with lots of data from exploiting them.
First Past the Post isn't actually an ordinal system. "Ordinal" is simply a synonym of "ranked choice". Arrow's impossibility theorem isn't relevant to FPTP, but that doesn't make it a satisfactory system.
> (It does reduce to an ordinal system in a two-choice election though!)
Yes. There was recently a two-choice election in the UK for the leader of a party that has ordinal voting as one of its policies. Amusingly, voters still ranked their choices rather than treating the election as FPTP.
That depends on the criteria, which could be "the candidate that most people accept/approve" (my personal preference), "the candidate that the most people will choose over all others", or something else.
I recall reading that a similar system in Australia (or New Zealand or somewhere) didn’t enable third party candidates at all, which was explain because of something something math.
I’d love to know is what the deal is.