Ranked Choice Voting is really complicated
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) allows you to vote for multiple candidates on a ballot, putting your favorite first even if you don't think they'll get elected. Without RCV, strategic voting is required - for example, voting for a Democrat instead of Socialist because you really don't want the Republican to get elected.
There are electoral districts that have implemented RCV. In my state, some counties have RCV, even if statewide is choose-one.
Any time we implement RCV, there must be a process that chooses which votes get counted, and which votes get thrown out. Some situations are extremely simple, and have really intuitive answers as to what is "right". Other situations are really tough. For some of the problems, there are purely mathematical solutions, but then choosing which mathematical solutions to apply is an ethical question - an ethical nightmare, even.
One of the questions to answer is: Do we want the most-favored option to win, or the least-objectionable?
Consider. John & Carrie are running for Mayor. Each of them can be ranked as "1", "2", or can be not-selected. John gets 51 "1" votes. Carrie gets "49" 1 votes. John gets ZERO "2" votes. Carrie gets 51 "2" votes.
In this case, Carrie ultimately got 100 votes. John got 51. But John got more first-round picks. We have to decide: Does Carrie, the least-objectionable candidate win? Or does john, who won round-1 win? We can't answer this with math. It is a deep and difficult question, and gets even less intuitive if we change the numbers.
My mindset coming to RCV is that each voter is thinking "If my #1 choice doesn't win, then I'm going to change my vote to _____". And this brings up a question of "when does the vote get changed?"
Consider. Beth, Gary, and Zohran are running for Governor. Each candidate can be given "A", "B", "C", or left unselected. There are 102 voters.
Beth gets gets 51 A votes, and no other votes.
Gary gets 47 A votes, 6 B votes, no C votes.
Zohran gets 4 A votes, and no other votes.
All 4 of the Zohran voters chose Gary as B. 2 Beth voters chose Gary as B. Zohran clearly loses, so Gary gets 4 more votes.
Now it's 51 for Gary against 51 for Beth. But 2 of Beth's voters also approve of Gary, having chosen Gary as their B vote. So does Gary win because more voters approve? Do we call this election a tie & have another election? Does Beth win because she had the most A votes?
This is far from an exhaustive review of how difficult Ranked Choice Voting can be. But I hope you can see that there are deep ethical questions about which votes get counted. That math alone can't solve these problems.
Additionally, RCV ballots are guaranteed to be more complex than simple yes/no ballots. Voters may misunderstand how to use them, and may cast votes they don't intend in their heart, just because of their misunderstanding.
I'm extremely pro-RCV. I'm also interested in proportional-representation, though I'm not studied up on it and I haven't thought deeply about it. RCV has already been implemented in many places, and I'm quite curious what their implementations for vote-counting look like. I'm curious what the scholarly works on RCV math/ethics are.
And I hope you'll work in your community to bring about Ranked Choice Voting. Talk to your local political parties and political orgs. Ask your county clerk how to start a ballot initiative. Ask your State Elections Board what the law is around RCV for your state. Do your fact-finding, then make sure you're going to have the time and energy to really work on it. Get other people to help you.
P.S. You don't need to resolve the complex questions I pose here. Getting RCV approved will lead to a committee or something that figures out the details.