I don't see a problem in the Alaska election. Perhaps I'm missing something? I posted this in a previous discussion but I'll repost because I'm keen to hear other perspectives.
From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a...
> 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the rules of ranked choice voting, Begich — as the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — was then eliminated, and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters ranked second.
> Unsurprisingly, most of Begich’s votes (50 percent) went to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29 percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were “exhausted,” meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich’s votes was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final round, while Palin received 49 percent.
Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich’s voters expressed a “Begich or nobody” preference. Many Begich voters expressed a “Peltola over Palin” preference. It’s not clear to me why pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don’t encode nuances like the above.
The objection about the spoiler effect is confusing to me. I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. But I don't think it's possible to identify these cases ex ante, and I don't see how they can in practice affect anyone's voting strategy. (Though maybe it's enough to get bad press like https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...?)
I think you can spin these technical narratives like "you threw your votes away because, if there had been a head-to-head it would have gone differently". But taking a simple explanation of what happened like the above, it's hard for me to see why the result is actively unfair.