Yes! Ranked choice voting means *you can vote your conscience* without doing any “political math” and without anyone being forced to drop out lest they split the vote for a particular group of voters, and therefore after you look up the people and the issues, you can just say “I would prefer Candidate A, and if not, then Candidate B, and if not them…” and so on.

And if your top candidate is eliminated, your vote goes to your next choice, and so on down the list. So if enough people really do just want Candidate A, even if they “don’t have enough charisma to get the popular vote” or “aren’t the top choice of a particular political party” or whatever other reasons you’ve heard for not voting for specific people whose experience and position you’re actually a lot happier with, then: Candidate A can get elected. Even if *everyone* thinks they won’t actually win because [insert pollster/pundit reasons here].

But yeah, it’s also just a lot cheaper to avoid runoffs when you can!

We did ranked-choice voting for our community committee when we lived in grad school housing that had a committee to deal with the stuff like “community room scheduling” and “buying the tools for the community garden and maintaining the compost” and… it wasn’t even that hard to do with hand-written paper lists? Just sort them all into “first choice on the list” piles, remove the smallest pile, sort those into the second-choice on the list, and repeat until done. Add a computer and it’s trivial and really fast, but it’s still a system that can be checked by hand if necessary.