Approval voting is simple enough, but is vulnerable to bullet voting: approving an additional candidate can make your first choice lose. This makes it unsuitable if your goal is to make third-party voting more viable, which seems to be the premise of the article.
And, particularly, there is very notable cultural variation, which means (ab initio at least; over time, one expects behavior modification efforts would be deployed around this), support from different cultural groups in a diverse polity will have different electoral value even when turnout is the same.
> Approval voting is simple enough,
But also has the same problem: concretely what “approval” means is unclear and will be subject to voter-to-voter variation even when the actual preferences are identical.
Only if you assume that compromising is fundamentally good. Do you believe the propensity is to compromise to get the best of the both worlds or the worst of the both worlds? I would point out, for example, that during the bush (II) administration, the only truly bipartisan, compromise initiatives were war in Iraq, No Child Left Behind, and Corporate Bailouts.
Perhaps the most important important property of a voting system is that it is easy to grok, so that people trust it. In particular, aggregates at the local level should combine simply with other districts to tally overall winners.You can tally IRV incrementally, it's just that ranking permutations are the units of aggregation. That's non-trivial. For this reason, I prefer approval voting.