The fundamental problem I have with all of this kind of analysis is that it treats democracy as a tool for finding the median set of ideas amongst a population of people with ideas, and that the “most democratic” system would enact the idea of each idea set that is most tolerable to the most number of people. This is the ur-liberalism.

Politics is the process by which society’s scarce resources (commodities, nature, leisure, whatever) are allocated between people with competing interests. A just outcome would require negotiation between representatives of affinity groups, however composed and however determined, weighted somehow by the size of each group and the impact upon them. Matters of popular opinion just fundamentally are not the problem of politics, and the Condorcet criterion is only good for finding the least unpopular opinion.

I honestly think there’s just no way to make a single-seat election just or democratic in any meaningful way. Multi-member districts are better, since at least you might elect representatives from multiple affinity groups.

I agree that figuring out ideal voting systems is an exciting endeavor, and different systems can be more or less appropriate. However, I completely fail to see how the Wikipedia examples represent a "failure" of ranked choice voting.

Most ranked choice voting systems can suffer from a crazy effect where getting more votes makes you lose

For the first election: you're making it sound like Bottom receiving the plurality of votes (45%) in the first round is causing it to ultimately lose. This is not true, Bottom loses because the majority of voters (55%) prefer Center to Bottom which is made clear in the second round after elimination and transfer of preferences from Top. This is good, this is the point of RCV and why it is vastly superior to FPTP.

Now for the second election: claiming that Bottom is all the sudden unpopular and therefore them winning is a bad thing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here to try to make ranked choice voting look bad. Why did all 6% lost from Bottom go into Top but then Center is split exactly down the middle in terms of preference? Those circumstances seem artificially contrived to me and not very reflective of how overlapping ideologies between parties would actually interact, especially as in the previous election the entirety of Top goes to Center as their 2nd preference (not calling you out but the sus wikipedia example). Again, the result is that

The reason I'm going kind of hard here, and I might be going a little crazy, is because I really feel like all this sudden RCV hate is very suspicious. I've had several otherwise "woke" and more-progressive-than-not friends sharing TedX videos giving similarly contrived situations to show that RCV is actually really bad and can totally be just as undemocratic as FPTP (their example was literally about where to put a refueling base for 4 weirdly spaced out Mars colonies). Then there was the recent Veritasium video about how voting is imperfect and can never be solved!!1! (So why bother, right guys?) And yeah, I get this weird feeling that even this incredibly simple reform that could bring a trifling of more authentic democratic representation to our Bourgeois Dictatorship of Capital that we call American Democracy is somehow getting psyoped against in order to maintain the two-party dictatorship. Like, all the big pop science entrenched youtube channels creating these kinds of videos just seems like a PR campaign to specifically dissuade those bazinga types that at least should be able to understand on a logical/mathematical level that RCV is much better.

Anyways, my main take is RCV is good and quite literally always better than FPTP. It's the simplest reform that should be default on any liberal party's platform if they weren't deeply unserious. Whether we end up even having direct elections of representatives or multi-option direct ballot initiatives in socialism I don't feel as strongly about, I'm open to all kinds of ideas. But don't let the RCV hate spread uncritically. If I'm totally off base than someone explain below cause I do feel like I'm going a little crazy here.

it used to study social choice theory a lot and so it was in the position you're in now. In the end, it turns out most of the math is completely irrelevant because people don't act according to rational incentives, but what they believe they're incentivized to do. In most systems, people exhibit behaviors that lead to two-party systems and all the other problems with FPTP. That includes all the "good" systems like Condorcet, Borda, etc. with the exception of range voting, where people actively vote more for unpopular options thereby giving "fringe" options a chance.

Anyway, it isn't really true that it matters to all voting. If you're forming a consensus, that counts as voting since you're documenting your preferences or your motivational profile, for instance.

With sufficiently large representative body sortition is best, the rest is bourgeois decadence. Obv won’t work with sample of like 3 in some bigass city

I'd be pretty wary about relying on all the tortured math examples that "prove" STV and similar ranked choice systems are bad

Liberal ideology, universal suffrage is a terrible way to run a real country. Council systems are superior in every way. Democracies based on population count specifically targets and dis-empowers minorities. It also doesn't properly take into account specific needs of specific groups. direct democracy is primitive and unsuited to delegating authority and politics in countries with millions of people with vastly different ideas and interests between them.

You cannot please everyone, there is no utopia, you're always going to be stepping on someones toes just a bit when making decisions, especially big ones. Decentralization does not always equal democracy.

The maths you're talking about rank fairness by how many (percentage) of the voters end up with a satisfactory outcome. There's a saying that the only perfectly fair voting system is a dictatorship, because only one person gets to vote, and they always get what they want. All other systems have flaws. As in most things, you are trying to maximize fairness.

The secondmost fair system is the Condorcet method, and in fact other systems are usually ranked by how often the winner is the Condorcet winner. The reason nobody uses Condorcet itself is that it's extremely complicated, and one tradeoff in any election system is whether the voters are able to understand, and therefore trust, the system. The more simple the system, the easier to explain, and the more people trust the outcome. FPTP's singular virtue is that it's stupid simple, and any idiot can understand it. Condorcet is at the other extreme, and other systems fall in between.

Ranked Choice is reasonably simple, and produces more Condorcet winners than FPTP. STAR is a little more complicated, but also a little more fair. And, yes, every system has edge cases where the wrong person - someone other than the Condorcet winner - is elected.

The objective is to get there best outcome for the most people, which includes strategies like reducing motivations for strategic voting, and allowing for compromise. The benefit to nearly every system other than FPTP is that they allow for the election of maybe nobody's favorite, but someone that it's acceptable to 100% of the voters; this is considered "more fair" than 51% getting their favorite, and 49% get someone they actively object to.

As you've found, no system is perfect (except dictatorship), and you can always concoct edge cases where the method fails; but that doesn't mean that some aren't better or worse than others, fairness-wise.

One absolute truth, though, is that FPTP is the provably worst system in terms of producing fair outcomes. In the US, Ranked Choice is slowly replacing FPTP in local elections. It's not the best, but it's better, and it's understandable, could be verified by hand, and doesn't require a computer to produce results within a reasonable time. In this case, Perfect is the enemy of Good, and while we could debate endlessly on the merits of various systems, replacing FPTP with Ranked Choice is a definite improvement.

I approve of approval voting.

Electoralism is dumb

Social choice theory is the intersection of game theory (bullshit) and economics (also bullshit) so it's double bullshit

Just let people vibe

Rating-based voting doesn't seem to have the issue of non-monotonicity that ranked voting does.

Sortition by lot, anyone?