It can't be mentioned enough that Approval Voting works with existing voting machines. One of the unfortunate difficulties with IRV is that it often requires a wholesale replacement of the voting infrastructure.
The Center for Election Science is a big supporter of IRV as a better system than our current "Choose One" voting method, but we've found that Approval Voting is both more descriptive and less prone to strategy, as well as being significantly easier to implement and use.<p>NB: I'm the Chair of the Board for The Center for Election Science. AMA.
Article makes some good arguments for approval voting, but the "Ballot Spoilage" argument is a bit disingenuous.<p>Ballots can't be spoiled in approval voting because any set of circles can be filled in. However it's a lot easier to <i>corrupt</i> a ballot undetected. Just fill in more bubbles for your candidate.
It's a bit silly to argue that candidates take up too much space on a IRV ballot when it would suffice to duplicate only the box and not their name, as in<p><pre><code> 1st 2nd 3rd choice
John Adams [ ] [ ] [ ]
Ben Franklin [ ] [ ] [ ]
Tom Jefferson [ ] [ ] [ ]
Betsy Ross [ ] [ ] [ ]</code></pre>
I really like Wikipedia's page comparing voting systems.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Comparisons" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...</a><p>No voting system is perfect but Approval Voting is my favorite. Still, most schemes that people have put forward are far better than the First Past the Post and there's been some momentum for IRV in Mass, where I live, so I've been helping with canvassing and it looks like our efforts might be paying off.
I think this would have a much more dramatic benefit toward US politics than the elimination of the electoral college, adding new US states, or fighting gerrymandering would.
What the article misses is that there are alternatives better than BOTH approval or IRV.
I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B.
I will always find IRV to be dumb because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy.
<a href="https://bolson.org/irv/" rel="nofollow">https://bolson.org/irv/</a>
Does Approval Voting really pass the "favourite betrayal criterion"?<p>There are scenarios where if you don't vote for both Good and Ideal, bad will win, and scenarios where if you do vote for both Good and Ideal, Good will win (over Ideal)<p>You obviously don't know which scenario you're in when you vote, so you don't know whether you should vote for both good+ideal or just ideal - both options can cause a worse result<p>I suppose the idea is that you use polling to decide which scenario is more likely and vote accordingly
Approval Voting is the best balance between fairness and simplicity.<p>I switched from IRV (RCV) to Approval Voting once I better understood the challenges of election administration.<p>That said, FPTP is just about the worst. For election administration, it's the most brittle, where the margin of error too often exceeds the margin for winning. So I'd happily support IRV, RCV, score voting, approval voting as a replacement.
As a libertarian anything that increases the ability of a 3rd party go gain traction interest me but something smells very off about the recent uptick in discussion of alternatives. If these changes were actually beneficial to the underdog in the general case you'd see them being pushed by the left or the right on a state by state basis depending on the political make up of any given state. The parties aren't run by idiots. They've crunched the numbers. They know whether the alternatives would benefit them or not. Likewise it makes me very uneasy that we mostly only see people who align with one party pushing for alternate systems.<p>I'm not opposed to alternate voting systems but I'd like to see one actually increase the power of the underdog(s) in a one party state (the only kind of state where the powers that be feel secure enough to make this kind of change) in the US before I support one. I don't want something that sounds good but furthers the status quo. Political diversity is one of the US's strengths and anything that furthers the status quo is bad for that.<p>Edit: why is this opinion unacceptable?
It seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative consequence of electing a joke candidate, since you do not rank your choices nor are you limited to how many you can choose. Unfortunately, many voters would not give a second thought to ticking "Mickey Mouse" or similar in addition to their main choice and alternates, since there is no tradeoff involved. Under IRV or Ranked Choice, few voters would likely rank the joke candidate high.
Surely this disenfranchises those most willing to compromise, who are probably going to end up being those who support small parties?<p>Let's say you a Right and Left party, and breakout Far Left which is actually very popular but has previously lacked electoral support due to its 'outsider' status.<p>People's favourites might look like this:<p>Right: 30%
Left: 30%
Far left: 40%<p>However, 75% of Far Left favourites actually vote for Left too, because they prefer them to right. This ends up with the following result:<p>Right: 30%
Left: 60%
Far left: 40%<p>So we are left with 'establishment' mediocrity instead of the most popular result.<p>Is this OK because a majority of people don't actually want 'far left'? Maybe. Intuitively though, I think taking preferences away will freak people out, particularly in situations where there might be different levels - what if there was a Far Right party that Far Left voters <i>really</i> don't want in - would some end up voting for Right to avoid that happening? They might win despite having 70% unpopularity!<p>I'd prefer difficult counting processes over a blunting of people's democratic will.