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by isoos 778 days ago
Nit: Approval voting (yes/no for each candidate) is easier to implement and also understand. I couldn't rank 82 people, but could yes/no them...
4 comments

Approval voting is just a different flavor of the same popular candidate tyranny. We need to be able to express support for non-duopoly candidates over the duopoly ones, and not continue to be held hostage fully supporting mainstream party #1 by the threat of mainstream party #2.

Unfortunately this devolves into geeking out over voting systems. Despite having the most popular support, Instant Runoff Voting is also a hot mess with its surprising nonintuitive outcomes. The way I see it, RCV/Condorcet is the way to go, regardless of the criticism that it allows for ties - it's criteria is straightforward and what most people would consider fair. Solve the ties with a tiebreaker IRV round (same input data type) or just a second election since they're going to be really rare with any significant population (how many times do we have ties with plurality?)

Hardly a nit when approval voting, unlike _any_ ranked-choice system, isn't mathematically shown to be inherently unsatisfactory.
Just pick your top 5 and it'll work out fine.
As long as you can answer a (long) series of "do you prefer A or B" questions, you can totally rank 82 people.
If I was voting in this election, I'm nearly certain I would not be able to answer that for most of the 82.
Well, if there's an A/B pair you can't separate, just pick either at random.
If my bottom 60 are all randomly shuffled then I haven't really ranked 82 people.