A community I take part in just tested out ranked choice polls for the first time, and several users didn’t realize it was even ranked choice. Since the UI just gives a dropdown for each option with the values 1 to N and “Abstain”, many people thought a higher value was better. At a minimum, mentioning somewhere in the rendered poll that it’s ranked choice (and possibly explaining that lower is better) would help. But I think a complete overhaul of the UX would be beneficial here.
Specifically, I would suggest changing it to a two column drag-and-drop approach. The left side would list the unselected options and the right side would list the selected options in the order specified by the user. The user could drag left to right to select an option, right to left to deselect an option, and within the right side vertically to re-rank the selected options.
That’s the first approach that came to mind, but really anything that shows it’s an ordered list would make it much more intuitive.