But that's not always the case; this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. The whole problem is that your vote only gets a second chance to be counted if your preferred candidate gets eliminated. If your preferred candidate loses because somebody else wins before your preferred candidate gets eliminated, then none of your later rankings affect the outcome whatsoever. This is why you can't actually vote honestly in IRV if you want your vote to count.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example:

Let’s imagine the US switched to RCV before the 2020 election, and Mitt Romney decides to run as an independent. Now let’s look at, say, West Virgina, which is a pretty red state, and went about 70% Trump 30% Biden in the 2020 election in real life

WV Democrats are still going to vote for Biden, and they’d probably prefer Romney over Trump, so let’s say they all vote in that order, but imagine roughly a third of Republican voters in West Virgina like Romney better than Trump, so we end up with this:

45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Biden, Romney, Trump

Romney gets eliminated first, his voters fall back to Trump, and Trump wins. The Democrats all wanted Romney over Trump, but Biden was never eliminated, so their second choice of Romney had no bearing on the outcome. But, what if they’d strategically voted for the “lesser of two evils”?

now we have: 45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Romney, Biden, Trump

Now Romney is a clear winner, he has the majority of first choice votes, so nobody’s second or third choice even matters. So basically in this example, Biden was a spoiler candidate for Romney, and all those Democrats are going to be super disillusioned when they realize that the “it fixes the spoiler effect" and "you can vote honestly” lines are both wrong, and they could’ve had a better outcome if they’d voted strategically, just like in the old system.