It neither increases obfuscation nor reduces integrity. If it reduces ‘trust’, it’s because of the substantial population of those who refuse to think anything through.

Your complaint is what, that more than two people ran for office? People and organizations have a right to run for public office and present themselves and their platform, even if you fancy it’s untidy.

“When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change,” isn’t my motto, but it does seem to apply in this case. You have not been able to prove that the results under ranked choice voting are any better than what the present system produces.

You haven’t defined what constitutes a ‘better’ result in any given contest, just danced around the checkerboard offering one contrived complaint after another.

I said that it’s possible that Golden would have come out on top in a two candidate race. That would have been a more acceptable result than going through the sham of ranked choice voting.

What’s the sham? The ballot is perfectly straightforward and the instructions on how to tabulate it are perfectly straightforward.

Did voters care enough to choose him and his positions on the issues, or were they dilettantishly trying to hedge their bets and have things both ways?

What the voters were doing is assessing the candidates and rank-ordering them according to preference. This is something people do with options every day.

You see things that way because you are a true believer and discount all arguments to the contrary as “dogmatic” and “non-sequiturs.”

No, you offered non-sequiturs and ill-thought-out talking points. Offer better arguments, and you’ll get some respect.

The article is not informative. It offers the same complaint you did. But the complaint you offered is that somehow it is illegitimate in a race that has a binary result (win-loss) to require the winner to have a majority of the tally to be installed and that somehow it is illegitimate to take account of people’s contingent preferences in tabulating the vote. We’ve had runoff elections for decades. Did Heritage minions complain about those?

Why is that more legitimate than the current scenario? “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change,” isn’t my motto, but it does seem to apply in this case. You have not been able to prove that the results under ranked choice voting are any better than what the present system produces.

Why? He did not win a majority. Most of the electorate was against him. The outcome strongly suggests that in a head-to-head contest, he would have lost.

I said that it’s possible that Golden would have come out on top in a two candidate race. That would have been a more acceptable result than going through the sham of ranked choice voting.

Did voters care enough to choose him and his positions on the issues, or were they dilettantishly trying to hedge their bets and have things both ways? Some people prefer one method, some the other. When there is no overwhelming reason for change, why change?

I will say the only dogmatic responses I’ve encountered come from one direction, and it’s not from partisan Democrats.

You see things that way because you are a true believer and discount all arguments to the contrary as “dogmatic” and “non-sequiturs.” There are a lot of people like that arguing for RCV. While it’s literally an exaggeration to say that you view it as an answer to all our problems, putting it that way does capture the dogmatism of many proponents of RCV.

Informative article:

https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/ranked-choice-voting-bad-choice

Vote exhaustion:

Or consider the mayor’s race in Oakland, California, in 2010, in which the candidate that received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes” after nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.

This also happened recently in Maine. In 2018, the first-ever general election for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice voting in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D) was declared the eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) received more votes than Golden in the first round. There were two additional candidates in the race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However, the Maine Secretary of State, Matt Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not ranked all of the candidates

Why? He did not win a majority. Most of the electorate was against him. The outcome strongly suggests that in a head-to-head contest, he would have lost.

You keep producing these non sequiturs. You mean he runs, some people prefer him and put King down as their second choice. Why is that less legitimate than some other scenario?

It doesn’t look like ranked choice voting promotes greater honesty in government,

Another non sequitur. If anyone ever studied the question, they have a limited data set in this country. That aside, the effect of the electoral system on the frequency of embezzlement in public agencies would certainly be intermediated between other factors and not the first question you’d ask about the electoral system or public corruption.

but it’s become something like a religion for some people, a panacea that will fix everything that is wrong with the electoral system. Not for nothing does it come from the state that gave us the Prohibitionist movement.

You want to tell me who said it would ‘fix everything that is wrong’? The projection in this statement is tiresome. I’ve had a few occasions to argue the question in fora like this. Just a few, because it’s not a prevalent topic of discussion. I will say the only dogmatic responses I’ve encountered come from one direction, and it’s not from partisan Democrats.

Bruce Poliquin (R) won the popular vote in Maine’s second congressional district, but because the voters for two independent candidates gave their second place votes to the Jared Golden (D), he won the election. It’s possible that in a straightforward race, Golden would have won anyway, voters having decided not to waste their votes on candidates who couldn’t win, but yes, Poliquin — having won a plurality of first choice votes — should have been elected. I’m not seeing why you think it advisable to restructure your electoral system so that you have a different sort of outcome.

You need to show your work when you make remarks like this.

My assessment is that it was adopted in Alaska and Maine to allow the Democrats or “moderate” independents (Murkowski, King) to lock out more conservative Republicans.

Whatever they thought they were doing, it doesn’t do that unless (1) you routinely have > 2 competitive candidates for an office and (2) your ‘more conservative’ candidate cannot garner enough 2d and 3d preference votes to win a majority of the tally. In that set of circumstances, if you’d ever had victorious ‘more conservative’ candidates, it would have been because they won a plurality in a three or four candidate race. I’m not seeing why you think it advisable to structure your electoral system so you have that sort of outcome.