This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.

It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.

Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)