Two counterpoints:

- I'm aware of Arrow, but I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good". :) Whatever the flaws of IRV, it still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences. (We suffer so much status quo bias, it takes a lot of activation energy just to communicate to the average voter that better options exist at all!) But I happily cede the point: IRV is not the best choice of all the available options.

- My favorite is actually Approval, and I don't always bring it up because it has lower mindshare and is less self-descriptive / "sticky-branding" compared to Ranked Choice. My reasons for the preference:

(a) There's no nitpicking over counting methods: whoever gets the most votes wins.

(b) Easy to explain to voters (including the counting system), and degrades gracefully for those who still want to vote for only one candidate. (I've heard objections that some voters hit a cheater-detection trigger, that "some people get more votes than others"; this can be solved by reframing as "Y/N" per candidate, so X candidates = X Y/N votes per voter).

(c) I believe it largely sidesteps Arrow by redefining the success condition: rather than attempt to perfectly measure ideal preferences, it definitionally represents "Consent of the Governed": not who's your favorite, but who are you willing to live with? This would make it more difficult for bolder and more unconventional candidates, but at the benefit of rewarding coalitions and consensus-building. Polarization and sowing distrust would cease to be a viable strategy.

(As an aside, in a perfect world, a blank ballot would be counted as a meta-vote for "None of the Above"; and if it wins, a whole new election of all-new candidates must be held.)

This is 100% how you should think about it. But what I'm trying to say is that we already have substantially better methods, so why not use them? Perfect is the enemy of good, but if I have the choice of eating acid, a bowl of oatmeal, and chocolate pudding, I'm going with the pudding. Perfect is the enemy of good when we don't already have the choices sitting right in front of us.

> [IRV] still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences

And here's where I'm disagreeing, but only slightly. It is definitely better, but not an order of magnitude.

> Approval voting

I love approval voting. It is great because of its simplicity. That's why they use it in systems like Netflix. Easy to collect and gather results from. Honestly I use it all the time. It is how I solve the "where do you want to eat" problem with friends. You just list things until you get a unanimous vote or if you exhaust your list you just take the most approvals. Simple and easy.

The reason I don't like it for elections is that it makes tying easy and I do not believe it has enough precision. The interview I linked Arrow talks about this so I'll deffer to him (he's clearly smarter than me). In elections you need a clear winner.

Why I like score voting (and Condorcet methods, like RP, which is again RCV) is because I actually hate party systems, but I recognize that they can't be destroyed. But these methods drastically reduce their power (I don't think IRV does).

And I highly encourage you to dig more into the subject and am happy to provide links. I also highly suggest looking deep into everything that the Fair Vote chart discusses, mainly because I believe you will be as frustrated as me (and others, like Condorcet proponents) when you learn what each of those topics are. Everyone I know that is well read in the subject is frustrated by Fair Vote's mischaracterizations.

I think this, all by itself, would be a great thing to have in elections. If this had existed in every election in which I have voted, I think I would have used it at least half the time, quite possibly more.

At any rate, I'm very much in agreement, I think it's a sound policy across the board, even in the context of FPTP. One thing our election system fails to do is disambiguate between voter apathy, and the implicit protest vote of staying home (Australia's mandatory voting being another solution, albeit lacking the teeth of a "None of the Above" reboot).

An alternative for many posts would be to have no one in the office once the incumbent's term expires. For example, suppose no one wins a race for a seat in the House of Representatives: when the incumbent's term expires, that seat could simply be vacant, and could be deemed to have voted "abstain" for all votes during the term in which it is empty (or until a new special election is held to hopefully fill the seat).

(For an office like the President, there might have to be some other provision made.)

This would also handle the other case you mention:

> For more local elections, where running unopposed is not uncommon, there's also an interesting conundrum: should that candidate be rejected if they only receive a plurality, ie under 50%?

I would say yes: that counts as no one winning the election, so the seat remains vacant until a new special election is held (assuming someone does win that).

> What if literally no one else wants the job?

Then I would say the will of the people is that they prefer to have no one doing it, if they do not approve of anyone who wants it.

There are conditions which resolve this (e.g., when ballot markings in a method like score voting represent the amount of some valuable resource the voter commits to paying if the given choice is elected, or where markings in approval represent a binding commitment to not participate if an non-approved option is chosen and/or to participate if an approved options is chosen.) But these resolutions are typically not available or desirable in most public elections.

> that there is no objective question about preferences that they ask

I don't see this as an issue. I also don't see it as a problem to specifically non-ordinal, but to every system. I like to try to explain a STAR05 ballot simply to people with a forum they are very familiar with. A ballot might look like below

How do you feel about ___x___ candidate?

Very Unfavorably, unfavorably, neutral, favorably, very favorably

Those are your 5 options. Yes, this isn't exact, but we can't have an infinite score. But as we understand distributions, we know that the fluctuations won't matter much. If a group of people have an "honest" opinion that a candidate is rated "favorably" (or a 4) we'll see a distribution around this (a fairly tight distribution). So you'll get some 3's and 5's, but most people will give 4's and the average will be 4. So it isn't an issue. Similarly, if you are ranking people and view two candidates equally 50% of people will put candidate A in front of B and vise versa (well real world there'd be a bias for things like: who is listed first, "nicer" sounding name, familiarity, etc. But still, that's not too big of an issue because at the end we get pretty close to the optimal efficiency that the system can provide). You have to remember that there is no perfect system, Arrow and Gibbard showed that. But the question is if we statistically come close to the optimal (that the system can provide).

I want to point out that simple approval voting is VERY effective, even though it is low precision. You're literally choosing "like" and "dislike." Analysts aren't that concerned with the lack of objectivity in the difference between a 4 and 5 or a 3 and 4 because it is much more refined. If this is a major concern, then extend the expressiveness by increasing the range, e.g. 0-10.

I would also encourage you to listen to that interview that I linked. Arrow briefly discusses this topic. He makes some criticisms of score voting but also says it is the option he would push (question is which he'd advocate for). Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. There's always a trade-off. We're just trying to minimize the trade-offs.

And personally, if someone made RP popular I would gladly advocate for it. But because we're trying to trade one shitty system (plurality) for something only slightly less shitty (IRV) I am going to be vocal about the issues and lying that is happening. I don't really have an issue with RCVs, but specifically IRV. This is why I wanted to make a clear distinction between the two. Because when the discussions come up we end up using different languages, using the same words to describe different things. This may have been a smart move by Fair Vote, but we're on Hacker News and there's an expectation of more nuance than we'd have in other places like Reddit or in person.

So I am happy to try my best to answer questions and provide more resources. If you like game theory, this is a great subject to learn and has clear and immediate applications (even outside of elections).