I won’t get deep into a response, other to say that your analysis is careful and considered, and deserves a few claps. My unfortunate personal opinions, which I do my very best to keep out of Medium, are that not only is Ranked Choice Voting not going to fix democracy, literally nothing is, because democracy itself is just a front to try and manufacture consent. It’s a game of theater to try and keep the peasants from revolting against the ruling class. We didn’t throw off our king a couple hundred years ago, we picked different ones, smarter ones, who had a pretty good idea how to prevent us from throwing them off.

And further, I’m fine with all that because I have kids and I’d rather they not get stuck in a civil war, so I’m generally a fan of the broken system, outside of certain structural problems with the media which are probably going to push us closer to civil war over the next decade.