Standard RCV isn’t a viable choice for the Steering Council elections. It’s a single-winner electoral system–but the Steering Council elections need to produce five winners. We’d need a multi-winner variant of RCV, perhaps Single Transferrable Vote, aka STV.
Anyway, I’m a firm -1 on this. I think RCV is basically awful. Voting in an RCV election is awkward, its tabulation is overly complicated, and it’s actually terrible for outsider candidates (read: third-party candidates). I suppose it’s a small improvement over “plurality” voting (aka “first-past-the-post” voting). But that’s faint praise indeed. And I’d be very surprised if STV was a big improvement over RCV.
I’m an amateur electoral system enthusiast. I’ve done a bunch of reading on the subject, and watched a bunch of videos too, and I’ve formed my own opinions… though I wouldn’t call myself any sort of expert. The most illuminating thing I’ve seen on this subject is this 6-minute video from Mark Frohnmayer. (Warrning: Mark is wearing a shirt with a swear word on it, sigh.) In the video, Mark uses animated visualizations to demonstrate how bad most voting methods are. There’s a Python connection here: the visualizations are Yee diagrams, an invention of Python’s own Kai-Ping Yee. Yee diagrams are an excellent visualization for analyzing electoral systems; animating them makes them even more revelatory. The video makes it clear: of the four systems examined, RCV is easily the worst, collapsing into risible incoherence with only four candidates. Again, I can’t imagine STV is any better.
If I understand correctly, we currently use a form of multiwinner approval voting called Block approval voting to elect the SC. And approval voting is really pretty good! Given the choice between “stick with our existing system” and “switch to some form of RCV” I’d definitely prefer the former.
If we do want to switch to an even better electoral system, I suggest STAR Voting, specifically its official multi-winner variant Bloc STAR. STAR Voting is a big improvement over RCV–its ballot is simpler and easier to get right, and tabulation is straightforward. Sure, STAR Voting has its share of theoretical flaws, as do all electoral systems. But in practice it seems to produce the best results, in terms of producing results that make the most voters happy. I think of STAR Voting as the “practicality beats purity” electoral system.
The cutest argument for STAR Voting is this 7-minute video, in which stuffed animals experiment with different voting methods. If you’re interested in more rigorous arguments, I suggest this page of articles at the STAR Voting website. It includes several articles on RCV vs STAR; I liked this one best.
As it happens, I wrote my own election tabulation library (in Python, of course!) specifically so I could play with STAR Voting:
My starvote library supports STAR Voting, Bloc STAR, and several proportional representation voting systems. I wrote it for fun and to learn more about electoral systems. I’m pretty sure it works fine, though AFAIK it’s only seen a teeny-tiny amount of actual use.
p.s. If I understand correctly, the pedantically-correct term for RCV is Instant Runoff Voting, or IRV. At least, that’s what Wikipedia and Electowiki both call it. But I know what you mean when you say RCV.
p.p.s. Mark Fohnmayer is the father of STAR Voting. So, sure, it’s unsurprising his video concludes STAR Voting is best. I still find his facts compelling.