[dragonwriter]

> Ranked Choice Voting is seen as a panacea to two party politics and polarization.

I suspect that, if Instant Runoff Voting—I will continue not to reward the marketing effort of trying to claim the name “Ranked Choice Voting” for the worst seriously-advocated ranked choice election method—is seen as a panacea for anything, it’s by a very small fraction of even the people that prefer it to FPTP voting.

> But no matter how you feel about it, RCV is demonstrably more complicated than FPTP.

Forget FPTP, IRV is more complicated than many other ranked-ballots methods that aren’t Condorcet methods, and needlessly so.

[tunesmith]

I still don't think Condorcet is complicated. If one candidate would beat all others head-to-head, that candidate is the winner. It's just the loop-breaking algorithms that make it complicated, and people get hung up on those when they're relatively rare. Besides, if there's a loop you could just hold some sort of a runoff for the looped candidates.

One of the major disservices to Condorcet is that the vote-theorist communities insist on talking about the loop-breaking algorithms as being Condorcet methods, rather than as separate tie-breaking (loop-breaking) processes that are bolted on after identifying the (usually 1-member) Smith Set. Some of this is because the algorithmic implementations do both steps at once, but it's not necessary.

[dragonwriter]

> I still don't think Condorcet is complicated.

Conceptually, no. But we’re talking about, mostly, tallying complexity. Condorcet itself, and therefore some but not all Condorcet methods, is “simpler” than IRV in that the number of values that need to be tracked is smaller (at least where the ratio of the size of the electorate to the number of candidates is large, as it typically is in public election of officials), but that's not true of all Condorcet methods.

> One of the major disservices to Condorcet is that the vote-theorist communities insist on talking about the loop-breaking algorithms as being Condorcet methods, rather than as separate tie-breaking (loop-breaking) processes that are bolted on after identifying the (usually 1-member) Smith Set. Some of this is because the algorithmic implementations do both steps at once, but it's not necessary.

That's not a “disservice to Condorcet”, its a necessity for the evaluation of real-world election methods.

[tunesmith]

I mean it's a disservice to communicating and messaging about Condorcet by making it seem more complicated than it is. There are countless Condorcet variants, of various complexity. To look at the complexity of those variants and paint with a broad brush by saying that "Condorcet is complicated" does a disservice to the aim of seeking broader acceptance of Condorcet.

An example is that the Condorcet Method (identifying the usually single-winner Smith Set) is not subject to the same various "voting flaws" that the various tie breaking mechanisms are. But then the community is happy to say that Condorcet is flawed along those lines when it's not.