Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates.
RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate.
It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help.
ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is hard for SCOTUS to torpedo (though I suppose I shouldn't underestimate SCOTUS).
Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”.
We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.
And that's electoral votes. Counting actual people has the most voted candidate lose all the time.
Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two. If I don't check my third choice then I risk them losing to even worse options.
> We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.
And people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment.
> Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two.
Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting. Instead of scoring each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, it's score each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1. Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.
> Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting.
I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.
> Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.
That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".
> I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.
Compressing it makes it slightly worse, but some people think it makes it easier to understand. I tend to think that's silly; people can understand "score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10" perfectly well. But approval voting would still be a significant improvement over FPTP, and even over RCV.
> That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".
RCV doesn't solve that either, because it's subject to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It's actually even worse, because it makes you give a lower rank (rather than an equal one) to your most favored candidate to prevent an even worse candidate from winning.
Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate.
Meanwhile with score voting your favorite candidate might have won, because they were the first choice of only 20% but the second choice of everyone else, and then end up with an average score of e.g. 6 when all the others are at 4 and 5.
RCV tends to do the opposite of that. If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes. Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.
RCV completely solves the “spoiler candidate” problem, which is a huge issue limiting choice and innovation in the two-party-dominated US. Approval Voting remains susceptible to spoilers.
In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhetorical advantages are inconsequential.
No, approval voting effectively solves spoilers. For example, the Green Party can't be a spoiler for the Democratic Party as people who like both will simply vote for both. RCV has its own novel form of spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze
The 2022 Alaska special election is a great example of RCV failing where approval voting wouldn't. And FairVote had the nerve to say it showed Alaskans understood and could use the system.
> Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around
It's a lot easier to claim the system is rigged when the voting system is much more complex in a way that most voters will not understand.
That site promotes range voting, and rather superficially dismisses approval voting: "Why Range Voting is Better than Approval Voting": https://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html
We've got MMP here in New Zealand, which is a fantastic improvement over what we had. However the list vote does give politicians some weird power.
> Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost”
As a non-US-American, it is hard to understand for me why this is so hard to explain: the amount of #1 votes is rather a measure for the number of "ultra-fans" that the candidate has.
I think it should be rather easy to find an example in US-American pop culture of some C-list celebrity who has a respectable base of very devoted ultra-fans, but is hated by basically everybody else.
This example should make the fallacy obvious to most people.
You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).
So if you're in a heavily red state but you're blue, then vote in the primaries for the more centered Republican. If you're in a heavily blue state but red, do the opposite. Either way this actually helps because more people are centered and we're getting wilder and wilder candidates because there's increased tribalism. They go to the extremes because they get more voters that way. They figured out that the mainstay voters will just end up voting left or right regardless, and that by catering to the extremes it actually pulls the mainstream voters too. (Both Reps and Dems are using this strategy)
Remember, you don't have to vote for the person you actually like.
And keep doing this until we get a sane voting system which can embed actual preference (any of the cardinal systems: i.e. Approval or STAR). This strategy still works with ordinal systems (i.e. Ranked Choice) because a weak spoiler is still really good at splitting the vote (happened in a pretty famous Alaska election).
Republicans in my state, TN, having eliminated the last Democrat congressional district, now want to close primaries, precisely to prevent strategic voting.
That still requires the options. The next election for me is a primary, with only one race that both has more than one candidate and is competitive AFAIK. The two viable candidates (who will both move on regardless) are similar enough that I don't have a preference. WA has an interesting, non-partisan, top-two-move-on system for the non-presidential primaries.
Totally agree. I did exactly this in the recent primaries, and then got to vote again in a runoff.
I think of it this way: in a state where one party is clearly dominant, most offices will end up being held by members of that party. That means that the primaries for that party actually matter more than the general election.
RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate.
It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help.
ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is hard for SCOTUS to torpedo (though I suppose I shouldn't underestimate SCOTUS).