> My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do.
It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)).
> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted.
I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple.
Definitions:
- Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates.
- Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.
It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)).
> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted.
I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple.
Definitions:
- Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates.
- Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.