RCV was also on the ballot in Colorado, but for some reason they bundled it with a “jungle primary” for governor and a bunch of other seats, where the four choices on the ballot for governor in the general election would be the top four from the ranked choice primaries, regardless of party (so you could end up with four options from the same party in theory). The latter addition was pretty unpopular with both parties, who put out tons of messaging against it and especially conflated it with RCV. It got voted down with a significant margin.
I’m not opposed to either measure, but I’m really struggling to understand why they rolled the two together into one ballot initiative instead of separating it. Alas, I’m just a lowly voter not privy to such advanced political reasoning. Fortunately most of Colorado’s other ballot initiatives went well, at least according to my preferences.
The message you’re reading applies to the checkbox above for encryption, not the preferences url. The preferences key only needs to be set if you want to encrypt the configuration URL, it doesn’t affect what OP wants to do.
My memory is a bit fuzzy because I switched to Searxng after playing with Whoogle briefly, but I thought Whoogle stored preferences in a cookie or something similar; the preferences URL is for when you want to transfer the preferences for your current machine to another. So OP is misunderstanding what it’s for.
OP: if your preferences aren’t sticking, are you maybe blocking cookies entirely or something? I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t need to do anything with the preferences URL for your preferences to stick if everything is set up correctly, it’s only for transferring your preferences to another machine.