| FPTP makes the mistake of assuming that the person with the most votes is the best. Likewise, the biggest flaw of RCV (to me) is that it makes the opposite mistake: it assumes the person with the least votes in each round is the worst. This isn't necessarily the case. It's still much better than our current system because it collects more data-points from voters about their preferences, and uses that data to make more comparisons between different batches of candidates. But there are simpler systems out there with even greater voter satisfaction efficiency, because they don't make the same flawed assumptions about voter preferences. In approval voting, you either approve of a candidate or you don't, and you vote as such. Election science wonks like to talk about theorems and satisfaction of obscure criteria, but I think they often undervalue the two things that matter most: voter satisfaction and simplicity. "Simplicity" meaning: an optimal strategy that's simple-to-explain, an easy to understand outcome, low cost of implementation, etc. Most of us here are software folks, and we understand that designing a great system is the easy part; the hard parts are implementation and change management. Voting systems should be thought of the same way. |