United States | News & Politics

It’s the entire point of RCV.

And when the voters in Burlington, VT realized that, they abandoned RCV because they wanted either the plurality winner or the Condorcet winner, and RCV guarantees neither.

without knowing the political realities on the ground

What does "political realities" have to do with anything? You're making vote counting sound like a subjective thing, and that's explicitly the opposite of what it should be.

With a ranked ballot, it's trivial to run some math equations on it, provided you make some assumptions (e.g. the difference in preference between #1 and #2 is the same as between #2 and #3, and so on). Those assumptions are necessary because RCV doesn't prioritize individual expression beyond a simple ordering. If it had more context (e.g. like range voting or STAR), the analysis would be more useful. That's another fault of RCV, and why I don't recommend it for a crowded field.

Voting is not a mathematical equation.

It certainly is. The entire point of tabulating votes is to find the candidate the voting public prefers, and that absolutely is a math equation. Some voting systems use a simple sum, some use a Condorcet system to evaluate preferences, and others use a scoring system. All of them are, at their core, a math equation, and their formulation is designed to improve the inputs to that equation.

RCV chooses to go the route of a more complex algorithm (still a math equation) that knocks out candidates and applies their votes elsewhere. That decision has benefits and drawbacks, and I personally find other systems to have a better set of tradeoffs.