Obligatory: "Ranked Choice" is a specific use of ranked ballots. It's subpar. It beats what we're doing now, but anything beats what we're doing now.
What you want is a Condorcet method like Ranked Pairs, where the winner is whoever beats everyone else. RCV just picks whoever can scrounge together 50% first. RCV would not elect a candidate who is literally everyone's second choice. Ranked Pairs would.
The simple alternative is Approval Voting, where you let people check all the names they like. It matches Condorcet results... somehow. There is no good reason we're not using it everywhere.
Approval Voting seems to just dilute your vote the more candidates you vote for. Candidates will tell people people to only place one vote. What a silly system.
But ranked choice is easy to implement and in practice if everyone would put a candidate second they aren't likely to be knocked out in the first round. There are very limited practical examples where it doesn't provide the optimal outcome.
It also seems to have some level of support and momentum in the US and it seems to me like it'd be better not to get caught in the weeds fighting over which new voting system should be implemented there.
Nobody thinks its a magic bullet, we're all looking for the next rung that leads us closer to a happy democracy. None of us are looking for instant easy solutions, we're trying to iterate and be better.
This is absurd. Take a look at the polls. There is only one 3rd-party candidate with double digit percentages. Do you really think JFK is taking more votes from Biden than Trump?
I never made any indication on how I'm voting. I'm just tired of this baseless claim that voting 3rd party only helps Trump. Polls excluding 3rd-parties show Trump significantly further ahead than those with 3rd-parties. Therefore, Biden's only chance of winning is due to JFK capturing conservative votes.
What is "how America works" in this context? You seem to be trying to make the point that 3rd-party voting only hurts Biden. I'm pointing to recent polling that shows that, when 3rd-party options are included, Biden's margins get closer to victory. You should be thanking 3rd-parties if you are hoping for a Biden victory.
A different way to think about it - most of the intended audience on Lemmy, and especially in this community, would've voted democrat instead of republican. So from the frame of reference of this post, most folks here claiming to vote third party did in fact have their vote "taken" from Biden.