Approval voting is much simpler than ranked-choice, and more appropriate for the general public.
I did get the chance to flick through a Californian voter information guide for this last election and it seems like if your goal is to make voting simpler then looking at ballot initiatives would be far more useful.
http://scorevoting.net/WhatVotersWant
Maybe they think it's too complicated.
I think his points are pretty good ones. There was a lot of anger and unhappiness after the 2010 election and the role preferences played in it. I'm not going to change my mind entirely on one poll which hasn't ever been repeated when there are valid objections to the question and the signal isn't even that large. You could have polled people on if the electoral college should be gotten rid of after the last US election and you'd probably get a similar sort of polarised answer for the same reasons.
More importantly, I don't really care about what people prefer in their voting system. That probably sounds bad, and I think it's important that people trust it but it's a technical answer to the question of how we discover what people want. That's what I care about, which is why I support compulsory voting which ensures a more representative government at the cost of forcing everyone on the rolls to vote.
I'm also not some weird person who thinks we have it perfect here. Obviously optional preferential voting in all cases would be better, not just for the federal senate, and Hare-Clark nationwide would be even cooler than that. There's always improvements to be made.
http://www.fairvote.org/why-approval-voting-is-unworkable-in...
Later-no-harm is a silly "anti-criterion" that causes more harm than benefit. See explanation by a Princeton math PhD who co-founded the Center for Election Science.
http://scorevoting.net/LNH.html
He refutes similar FairVote FUD here.
http://scorevoting.net/RichieRV.html
FairVote lacks expertise and lies a lot.
https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/fact-check
Here's a layman friendly talk I gave to the Colorado League of Women Voters a few years back.
I suppose we'll see how Maine handers their newly-implemented ranked-choice scheme in the coming election cycles.
This can be objectively measured via metrics like ballot spoilage and precinct summability.
http://scorevoting.net/Lorenzo.html
Here's a read-through of a talk I gave on this.
True, but equilibrium is not the goal. The mere fact that a political system has been around long enough to approach equilibrium means that people have been sleeping at the wheel for a long time.