Ranked Choice Voting is not much more than makeup, TaraElla. You write well, but we have to dig into the system itself.
First off, I know a candidate who won with 35% of all votes because of Ranked Choice Voting. That is a major disgrace. He ran when the incumbent didn't run, and so did 20 others. Result: many rounds of tallying until 30% of the voters were removed because their numbers 1, 2 and 3 had fallen off the tally. So, my candidate won with 50% of that remaining 70% of the voters still in the game.
Ranked Choice Voting is still winner-take-all. It does not represent more people. The smart part about RCV is that it incorporates run-off elections, so it is cheaper and the result is known faster.
What you write about Australia is not correct.
Australia does not have an elected President, so instead of three institutions they have two. It matters because voters vote twice over there and then these votes can start arguing with one another, while we vote three times and then our votes can start arguing with one another far more.
Also, Australia has a major third party in the Greens, holding 10 percent of the seats in both houses. This is NOT because of RCV, but because of Multi-Seat elections for the Senate. Multi-seat elections are a form of Proportional Representation, meaning one portion of the political population is expressed in that portion at the table of decision makers.
In Australia, the States have 12 Senators each, so it isn't super-refined, particularly since they vote just for 6 per election round. That means the minimum percentage to get a seat is 14.3% of all votes.
The House is winners-taking-all. Because the Senate elections gave rise to the Greens, the Greens are voted in by a number of voters in winner-take-all as well. Again, the lack of an elected President makes the top of the pyramid lower and that makes the competition less fierce.
Ranked Choice Voting is nothing but make-up. People are had when they think they got something better because they didn't.
Thank you for saying that we are stuck in a two-party system.
There is a way out, with the help of the Founding Fathers because the US Constitution does not allow winner-take-all at the local level. Cities and counties hold elections in districts and that violated the US Constitution.
One cannot have a round of divide-and-conquer in place at the local level -- not allowed.
https://fred-rick.medium.com/why-is-district-voting-so-bad-2e30155cad2e
