Ranked Choice voting is where each ballot position allows individual voters multiple choices of candidates, usually up to five.
There is nothing ‘democratic’ about this method. It means that in situations where a secondary candidate is running in opposition to the most popular candidate, in a close race, the opposition will win. Nothing ‘democratic’ in that. People who vote for the losers get five votes more than people who vote for the winner.
In four cases I’ve witnessed the opposition candidate has won in the ranked choice run-off. Two elections in San Francisco, the loser won; in one an outright unqualified communist won for District Attorney, in Oakland an incompetent boob won for mayor against a qualified candidate and in New York a ding bat won the Mayor’s race but the election board simply ignored the ranked choice tabulation and gave it to the largest vote getter.
The technically correct vote counting is done by starting the way a democratic race usually is counted. The candidates are arrayed from the candidate getting the most votes down to the candidate getting the least votes.
Then ranked choice comes into play. The candidate at the bottom of the array is struck off and the people who voted for him/her get another four votes. The loser’s voters' votes go to the other candidates they voted for. The same is done with the votes of the people who voted for the other losers. They get four more votes. In Oakland there were 14 rounds of votes reallocated.
When any candidate in the array gets over 50% of the total votes he/she is declared the winner.
As you can see, the most popular candidate only gets the one vote of his voters. The losers' supporters all get four more votes. That is why a candidate who is running as an outsider/opposition can get his/her supporters voting four times. Giving the outsider/opposition a good chance to cross the 50% finish line first.
I’ve run four winning major political campaigns, regular- style voting, and taught campaign management to large groups of other campaign managers.
This is how I would win a ranked choice campaign.
First identify the candidates who are clearly running in opposition. Secondly identify the candidates who will clearly be at the bottom of the ticket but friendly. Even solicit friends to run in this category of definite losers. Get four certain losers if you can.
In your campaign run with yourself as the top choice and suggest four losers as your preferred running mates. Change the order of your four losers in different campaign media. Your object is to get your own voters to be on the list of votes among the losing candidates.
Summary: Run your campaign with an array of four suggested allies so your supporters get extra four votes when the loser's votes are tabulated. Make sure to change the order of the four names so as to keep them among the clear losers. That way your own supporters will get up to four more votes and one of them will always be for you.