[fjuerfilis]

Yeah, I agree. I do research on things very closely related to voting systems, and my first thought is approval voting. It's basically rating with two options, approve and disapprove. Has good properties and is relatively easy to understand and implement, especially in the age of social media.

People seem to get fixed on ranked choice voting versus plurality voting (the current system), and what we really need is a movement to change the voting method to something more accurate.

But it's puzzling to me why the discussion seems to highlight ranking rather than approval voting. The only argument I've really heard against it is that people would get confused and not realize they can vote for more than one person. But it seems to me in that case you've just re-implemented plurality voting, and people would figure it out well enough. Just put out a big public ad campaign. People would learn.

[cpeterso]

I think Approval voting would solve a lot of the first-past-the-post voting while also being much easier to explain to non-math nerd voters than IRV or Condorcet voting: just give every candidate a thumbs up or down. :)

Oakland switched their mayoral election to IRV (maybe ten years ago?) and it was so misunderstood that even one of the candidates recommended that his supporters vote for him in every IRV rank position! (Or perhaps he just didn't want to recommend his supporters even think about the other candidates names?)