Okay, Ranked Choice is a system where you have to rank candidates in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. Fuck that up and your ballot is thrown out.
The way Ranked Choice is counted is thus, If no single candidate has at least 50% of the current valid ballots, the candidate with the least amount of votes is ejected from the election and the ballots that have the ejected candidate move on to the next remaining candidate on said ballot.
This works quite well if the election only has two rounds. You have your first choice and then a backup. Done.
It falls apart badly if you have more than two rounds. Your backup might have been eliminated in an earlier round, and now your vote goes to the backup of the backup, but maybe they weren't popular either and also got removed in an early round. Now your vote goes to your last placed candidate, your most hated option. Or your ballot is just completely thrown out. The ultimate winner needs 50% of remaining ballots, which can end up being 80% of the initial ballots cast. 20% of ballots are just thrown out.
And the really fun part, if you had swapped your first choice for the second, the chances of either of them winning would have skyrocketed.
Because Ranked Choice makes no fucking sense. There are about a dozen research papers based on actual real world elections that try to explain how the fuck the results happened. Results that never match the polling data, because the system is fucked.
Also, Ranked Choice has to be counted in a singular location, you have to physically ship all the ballots over, and if extra ballots show up, well, who the fuck knows where they come from. The single counting location also means you cannot start counting until after the election is over.
The "mysterious additional ballots fuckup" actually happened in a NYC mayoral race, the winning candidate was actually the one to say hold on, this doesn't line up right, the source of the extra ballots was found as test ballots that should not have had the actual candidates listed, it should have had something like ice cream flavors or some shit. Anyway, the winning candidate still actually won.
We can't say the same about the fuck-up in San Francisco, where the count procedure was wrong, and the actual winning candidate was eliminated in the first round, and the candidate who should have actually been eliminated was sworn in and actually served in the position for a full month.
It's these sorts of fuckups that set the entire voting reform effort back by decades.
STAR voting is substantially different.
A voter basically gives each candidate a 5-star review. Multiple candidates can have the same rating.
Counting is also different. You simply count up the score that each candidate gets, and add it to the running total. Counting can be done at the polling location. This makes the election more secure. There's no single point of failure.
You can also count ballots as you go. You can then publicly release that data as it comes in.
When the election is over, the two candidates with the highest average scores compete in an automatic runoff.
How it works is simple. You look at every ballot. If candidate A is rated at a 5 and candidate B a 3, then the vote goes to A. That's it, whoever is rated higher on any given ballot gets that ballot as a vote.
The twist is when two candidates are rated the same. Those ballots are still counted. They're counted as "No preference" and the number of those is also released.
This lets the newly elected person know just how much of a true mandate they have. If your average was a 3.2 and almost a third of the people who did vote for you had no preference between you and the runner-up, your behavior in office should probably reflect that fact.
Rather than just saying "I'm the winner, fuck you" which would likely still happen...