Approval voting is extremely effective at capturing voters’ preferences, simple to implement, and incredibly easy to explain - not just the ballot, but how the ballots are tabulated and how the winner is chosen.
The entity you linked to, The Center for Election Science, has a “howto” for bringing better elections to your city or county: https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chap.... That’s where we started and I can vouch for it.
What is the simple way to pitch its advantage to IRV without using technical terms?
The spoiler effect is simple to explain because we’ve seen it. A hypothetical centre squeeze isn’t.
My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting. (I am still sceptical of it, though I welcome experiments like the one your propose in Seattle.) When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.
Good question. It's probably that the tabulation works the way a voter thinks it would.
Neither IRV/RCV nor approval has a way to tell how much more you prefer your favorite to your #2 or #3 (something STAR/Score has, and kudos to it). What's that mean? They both have to assume. Most voters don't realize that IRV assumes massive gulfs between their #1, #2, and #3.
The example I give is Seattle's 2021 mayoral race, which has 15 candidates, at least 8 of whom are running serious races. With 8+ serious candidates, all sharing the left-of-center spectrum, there's tons of overlap. So, imagine you and a friend or spouse have similar views and support the same candidates, but rank them subtly differently. You rank A, B, C, your friend ranks B, C, A. In each runoff, your and your friend's opinions will end up competing with one another, even though both of you share the same opinions and support the same candidates.
(For anyone else reading, here's a longer version that I didn't write: https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec.... Ignore the title - the problem isn't extreme or not extreme, it's that the result doesn't reflect the opinion of the electorate.)
And the reverse is also true. IRV unintentionally rewards candidates who have their own dedicated constituency who always put their candidate #1. While it's not my role to moralize about that, choosing a candidate because a small group of voters vehemently support a candidate is not likely to make the most voters happy.
Since you brought up simple explanations.. a related simple benefit is that essentially everyone can explain how winners are chosen in approval voting. Very few people, even many active proponents of IRV, can thoroughly explain tabulation of IRV ballots. In an era when election processes are becoming politicized, a system that the average person understands well enough to explain to someone else is valuable.
I'm ignoring the most obvious easy-to-explain reason, that it does a better job of "reading voters minds." That's part of the original submission, though.
(I've now talked or exchanged emails with a fair number of people who thought they were RCV/IRV supports, and I learned that STAR delivers the benefits that many or most assumed that RCV provides. STAR lets you score every candidate on a 1-5 star scale, so you can rate candidates the same, rate them better/worse than one another, and critically, can decide for yourself how big each gap is. The vast majority of people who think they're strongly supportive of RCV/IRV would switch their support to STAR if they heard of it, and when I talk with them, they often do switch.)
> My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting.
I support IRV as an improvement, but I'd need more evidence that IRV opens the door for approval - or that it doesn't. If you have evidence or at least a hypothesis how that would happen, I'd appreciate it.
For example, would IRV fail (what's that mean?), yet voters would not recoil, they'd decide they like the idea and just chose the wrong thing? Or would it succeed and people would look for something better? Something else?
My baseline is that it took us something like 200 years to get here (and 30 years since FairVote was created). If history is a guide, whatever we pick seems like it'll stick around for a while. That's a weakly held belief, though.
> When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this, since I don't oppose IRV - I just don't support it anywhere near as much as I do approval or STAR. My take is simpler: Seattle doesn't have either right now, and if we're going to switch, getting something great on the ballot (an initiative to change to AV) doesn't require any more lobbying or fundraising effort than something good or okay.
A skeptic could have asked "But will it pass?" until a year or two ago. St. Louis just switched to approval last year (https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/overha...) and 68% of voters were in favor (!), and Fargo, ND switched so in 2019, so that's been affirmed. The Center for Election Science was only created in 2011, so for 9 years (3-5 years of which was discovery), that's a fast adoption curve.
Also, approval is the only one that I think delivers enough benefit to be worth a significant amount of my own time. That's an entirely personal judgment though.
(I'd have a different answer if AV fans were running an explicit campaign against an IRV/RCV initiative that was on the ballot, but again, that's not me. At least in Seattle, I don't think either one is more or less difficult than the other.)
Sounds like we are in need of some voting-reform voting reforms!
One thing about the US for example, states get a lot of latitude on exactly how to conduct elections.
You have 3 candidates that you like in preferential order. A > B > C. But you like A only a little more than B and REALLY dislike C. Ordinal systems do not allow you to express this. When you score, you can say A: 5, B:4, C:0. Approval is just the same thing but with a smaller range and is easy to integrate into existing tools (I don't think that's a great argument though because we should rebuild these tools anyways considering massive security flaws we've consistently found).
They are obviously and measurably superior when you construct a measure designed around their shared features while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences.
dragonwriter thinks the metric being used in the article linked here was cherry-picked because it favours particular voting systems that the author likes for other reasons.
(I do not believe this, nor do I believe the similar allegation made by vintermann in a top-level comment that's currently the highest rated. Neither offered any actual evidence, and the metric used here seems obviously reasonable to me. What I could believe is if someone thinks that VSE / Bayesian regret captures the essence of what matters in a voting system, then they are likely to prefer systems like approval voting or range voting or STAR. I don't see anything wrong with that.)
> while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods
dragonwriter thinks that different voting systems, implemented in different cultures, will exhibit strategic ("dishonest") voting to different extents and in different ways, and thinks this is a problem not addressed in the OP.
(The linked article does consider strategic voting, of various different kinds, but it's certainly possible that it isn't realistic enough about what real voters might do. It would be easier to tell whether dragonwriter has found a real problem here, if dragonwriter had given some examples of variation in strategic voting that are important but neglected in the OP.)
> resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences.
dragonwriter thinks that what voters primarily have is preferences: candidate A is better than candidate B who is better than candidate C. This is what an IRV ballot asks for. STAR or approval-voting ballots ask different questions (please give a score for how much you like each candidate / please say for each candidate whether you would find them acceptable); dragonwriter finds that unsatisfactory on the basis that voters will have to translate their preferences into answers to those questions, and there is no One True Way to do that.
(I disagree with dragonwriter about what's in voters' brains. At any rate, looking within myself, it is very common that I have a better idea of some candidates' acceptability to me than I do of their relative ranking. E.g., maybe there's the Nice Party, which I like a lot, the Mean Party, which I don't like much but concede has some competence, the Evil Party, which I really don't like but again concede has some competence, and a bunch of Crazy Fringe Parties, none of which I know enough about to rate them relative to one another, but all of which I consider obviously unfit to rule. With a range/STAR system, I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 30, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. Or I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 70, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. These are importantly different opinions I might have. A preference-ordering system like IRV doesn't let me express the difference between those, but would really like me to say exactly what my order of preference between the Crazies is. For me, range/STAR does the best job of matching the actual kinds of opinions I have about candidates; 3-2-1 is also pretty good; approval and preference-ordering are similar to one another and distinctly worse than those two; and of course plurality/first-past-the-post is hopeless.)
No, that's not it at all. I mean, now that you mention it, that sounds like something I would agree with, but its not either what I was saying here or particulary relevant to this discussion.
What I said here is about honest not dishonest votes. For ballots that do not ask a question with an objective mapping to preferences, honest ballots for the same preferences are a cultural variable. (This article implictly recognizes that honest ballots have no consistent meaning for approval, when testing it with two different consistent mathematical models, though that doesn’t really address the issue and it ignores the same issue for other methods to which it applies.)
For typical public elections, this problem occurs mostly with: ballots that ask the user to assign a score or rating to each candidate which is either more detailed than an unforced ranked preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot allowing ties) or less detailed than a forced preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot not allowing ties). Phrased another way, it applies to ballots that ask the user to assign scores or categories to candidates, where either the maximum number of distinct scores or categories is either more or less than the number of candidates.
There's fairly extensive literature on scoring systems (mostly outside of voting research, because they aren't widely implemented as voting systems), whether with a wide number (e.g., 0-100) or narrow range (5 stars) showing that without an objective touchstone, these are highly variable between individuals, in a way which strongly correlates with culture, in how they relate to what people actually think, on an absolute or relative scale, about the things rated, with the only consistent thing being that they tend to be consistent with ordered preferences, but the additional information (for score systems) or compression (for limited-categories) is inconsistent.
For that reason, approval/score/etc. ballots are, at best (that is, considering only personal variation and discounting any significance of the cultural correlations) just ranked preference ballots with either randomized noise or randomized compression, into which the associated tallying methods read false signficance.
EDIT: MORE that this applies to the use of these ballots in typical public elections of candidates. For other types of voting scenarios, the ballot markings involved may have concrete meanings that make these methods better, even ideal in some cases.
For instance, when planning a group activity for which you want maximum participation from the voter pool, approval where an “approve” mark is a binding commitment to participate if that option wins is an ideal method. Similarly, score voting where the assigned score is a binding commitment of that many units some scarce resource to the common project in the event of victory for the chosen option makes perfect sense.
(But: Whatever the cause, I misunderstood your position and consequently misrepresented it, and I greatly regret that.)
It sounds as if you are arguing that it must be true because if you ask people to score things on a scale, people from different cultures tend to give different patterns of scores for a given preference ordering. I'll take your word for it that the "fairly extensive literature" does in fact show that they do, but I don't see how you get from that to the idea that preferences come first and scores are some sort of fundamentally unreal construct on top of them.
A person's culture may well influence their values. That doesn't make those values unreal or illegitimate or mean that when we're trying to aggregate people's values (in order to choose a candidate, policy, etc.) we should ignore that influence. That's obvious (or at least I think it is) in the case of specific values -- e.g., if a country has in it a lot of people whose culturally-influenced values favour peaceful foreign policy, they will tend to elect governments that favour peaceful foreign policy, and that's how democracy is supposed to work.
I think it applies equally if what's being influenced by culture is some other more abstract feature in the pattern of values. If members of one culture are more easygoing in a way that makes them find a wider range of political candidates "acceptable" than members of another, then candidates liked less by the latter culture will do worse than otherwise-similar candidates liked less by the former under approval voting, because being disliked by culture B will lead to more "not acceptable" votes than being disliked by culture A. I claim that's the right thing: being represented by the candidate B dislikes will cause more distress than being represented by the candidate A dislikes.
Now, it's potentially a different matter if what's happening is that people in different cultures have the same actual values -- both think X is a bit better than Y who is hugely better than Z -- but some cultural factor makes people from culture A who feel that way mark Y as "acceptable" and people from culture B who feel that way mark Y as "unacceptable". If you're saying that that "fairly extensive literature" demonstrates that that happens, as opposed to the situation where people in culture B really do feel a bigger gap between X and Y, then I agree that that's an argument against scoring-style or approval-style voting systems. I would be interested in some pointers to the literature in question, if so.
But to whatever extent there are actual differences in values that go beyond mere ordinal preferences, it is simply not true that "approval/score/etc. ballots are at best just ranked preference ballots with either randomized noise or randomized compression".
It seems obvious to me that real people, whatever their culture, can have values that genuinely and importantly don't reduce to ordinal preferences. Would you rather be given $30k, be given $25k, or have $30k taken from you? Would you rather eat a carrot, a radish, or a bowl of mud? Would you rather have your country led by Joe Biden, Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin? It's possible that people from different cultures would express their opinions about these options in different ways, but I flatly do not believe that there would be no information in what they say beyond "$30k > $25k > -$30k" or "Biden > Stalin > Hitler" or whatever.
Do you disagree with that? Or is it just that you are confident that the noise greatly exceeds the signal in typical cases? (Or some other option I haven't thought of?)
I think that ordinal preferences are the objectively comparable thing that voters fundamentally have, relevant to the question of normal elections of candidates in public elections. That’s not all they have, and if we had an objective way to measure and an objectively correct way to aggregate expected experienced (dis)utility you could probably build a better public choice system around such a measure and aggregate than anything using ranked preference ballots. But we know from the research done in scoring/rating systems that the kind of things done in score/range voting or compressed-preference ballots like approval aren’t anything like a consistent measure of that, even before considering aggregation issues.
For lots of group choice situations that aren’t elections of candidates for public office, either approval or score style voting (and probably in some cases other compressed-preference systems besides approval) have concrete comparable meaning across different ballots and make sense, as I discussed with some examples upthread.[0]
> But to whatever extent there are actual differences in values that go beyond mere ordinal preferences, it is simply not true that "approval/score/etc. ballots are at best just ranked preference ballots with either randomized noise or randomized compression".
It is, across a population, in normal secret ballot, no personal consequence for the relation of ballot markings to actual winners, someone must win, elections for public office [1], because there is no consistent mapping to what people have beyond ranked preferences and how they do scoring of the type those ballots call for. There’s been fairly extensive research on this where it comes to rating systems. It’s one of the reasons rating systems have trended away from generic forms (though there is a lot of inertia!) to context-specific forms that focus on what has consistent meaning across respondents for the particular use being made of the rating. E.g., Facebook a while ago dropping 5-star ratings for “Would you recommend?”, media platforms like Netflix and others that had star ratings switching to just Up/Down, etc.
[0] including some public elections, e.g., modified approval makes sense — and is in effect used in California (though it isn’t called that) — for conflicting ballot measures, where in the event of fundamental conflict of measures in the same election, the “winning” measure if multiple get at least the minimum required to pass is the one with the most yes votes.
[1] But even for public office elections, if you weaken any of those constraints you can find situations where this changes. E.g., plain approval would make sense in candidate elections if you eliminate the “someone must win” condition, and instead it is an optional position, and if no candidate (even the one with the most approval ratings) got more than some threshold (say, approval by a majority of voters), then the seat would be unfilled. Then, the approval/disapproval choice would have a concrete meaning rather than just being an arbitrary compression of preferences. (Actually, that’s effectively the same system as the one discussed above used by California for competing ballot initiatives, which works because in any such set of initiatives, “None are psssed” is a valid final outcome.)
A ratings ballot, on the other hand, involves massive amounts of thinking. First of all, the concept of what might represent an "honest" approach to intensity of preferences is open to debate. It's US culture to give their Uber driver max marks and tip the serving staff 20%; is this an honest reflection of the intensity of the average American's enthusiasm for service workers relative to people from non-American cultures or simply what they've been taught to do? And real world electoral situations give you all kinds of incentives to do other things (like give your preferred candidate max marks and all the other candidates 0, or all the candidates you don't hate at least 9 out of 10). Is the person who bullet votes max marks for his preferred candidate because that's what the campaign literature suggested really worth more votes than the person who carefully evaluated all the candidates on their merits but doesn't think any of the candidates are worth more than 6 out of 10? With approval voting it's arguably even worse because there's a massive dilemma over whether to vote positively for the candidate(s) you want or negatively to eliminate the risk of candidates you want to lose. Obviously this applies unevenly to different demographics: put someone downright nasty towards a particular demographic on the ballot paper, and suddenly that demographic is under pressure to Approve every other candidate, whilst others continue to happily only vote for candidates they actually want.
If you design an efficiency metric with the arguably unjustifiable assumption that votes always represent either a perfect expression of the intensity of their preferences or a simple uniform strategic vote, and you assume that the proportion of people voting strategically is unaffected by voting system, it is unsurprising that voting systems whose main shortcomings are strategic complexity perform well. Even looking at that data, IRV actually outperforms nearly all the systems if you assume IRV voters are honest and voters using the other system are very strategic which isn't unreasonable given the incentive structures of the different systems.
Framing is important, and I think STAR would be most optimal with good ol' Likert scale (five or seven point) rather than 0-N stars. But I think even simpler is the "3-point Likert" behavior of V321: approve, disapprove, and "meh, ok."
I don't like how IRV forces me to rank candidates I may know little to nothing about (e.g. downballot randos not on "my team"). I don't really care if Kick Puppies Party is above or below Trip Grandparents Party.
V321 is certainly more intuitive in the ratings (it's basically an upvote/downvote system) if not the counting, but it's still quite strategic. On the plus side, the most basic strategy of simply upvoting who you want to win and downvoting the candidates you hate ensures the most divisive candidates are removed from the pool and the obscure fringe candidates are unlikely to benefit, but there's a fair bit of juggling how many candidates to upvote or downvote depending on what you think of the candidates seen as most likely to win the final round
That is an implementation issue. IRV can be implemented as either requiring complete ordering or allow partial ordering (you have n candidates, you can assign each one level 1..n, but you may use the same level for more candidates to describe partial ordering).
Technically, that’s a complete ordering with unforced preferences, not a partial ordering.
A ballot with a partial ordering would be won for which for some pair of candidates A, B, none of A> B, A<B, nor A=B would be true. Equal preference and absence of preference are different.
A ballot that worked this way would be a meaningful extension in existing ranked preference methods that aggregate pairwise preferences from individual ballots, lile ranked pairs. (Whether the effect would be desirable is not something I’ve really analyzed, but that kind of method would naturally make distinct use of the information.)
Yes, it is weak ordering, not partial ordering.
> Equal preference and absence of preference are different.
Well, it may be understood as absence of preference, provided the absence of preference is transitive.
Edit: I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who’s spent a lot of time reading on the subject and wouldn’t dare pick a favorite for my country (US) or locality. I just want the opportunity to try systems that are likely more fair.
If all of the new things states are trying were concentrated in just one state the churn would destabilize it too much. By spreading out the chaos we collectively get to try many new things at once, but avoid being overwhelmed since each locality is dealing with fewer new things.
The main proponent of approval voting seems to be the Center for Election Science, which is a pretty small organization, though I think they've gotten a little bigger over the last few years. There's also some STAR voting groups. None of these groups have huge piles of money to spend.
Then there's news organizations (including the NPR story posted here on HN today) promoting RCV/IRV.
On its face, IRV seems pretty straightforward and reasonable. It's problems are complicated and hard to describe. The examples of non-monotonic results where voters can cause their preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too highly are counterintuitive and hard to follow, and I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking: "What? that doesn't make sense. You must have made a mistake somewhere..."
There's also the common sentiments of "this is an emergency we need to fix right now" and "everyone's already on the RCV bandwagon" and "replacing a broken system with a half-broken system is usually politically more feasible than replacing a broken system with a not-broken system" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and so on.
There are also criticisms of the other voting systems. Some people are bothered by approval voting's lack of ordered preferences, for instance, and score voting is susceptible to strategic voting where the most extreme rankings have the most influence. STAR voting mitigates that to some extent, but it's not perfect.
I worry that we'll replace FPTP with IRV, find out later that it didn't live up to expectations, and then when voting reform advocates start pushing for something better like approval voting or STAR, the voters will say, "why should we believe you when a bunch of voting reform advocates promised unicorns and rainbows and we got a system that doesn't work any better than FPTP?" And then they'll either say to heck with all this voting theory nonsense and go back to FPTP or just live with IRV. And that's optimistically assuming that our future selves don't just abandon democracy itself as an unworkable idea (and though I reject that premise I have to concede that there's no lack of evidence pointing in that direction).
> Unlike many single-winner methods, instant-runoff cannot accept equal rankings, and must discard ballots with multiple first-preferred remaining alternatives: such ballots would be equivalent to casting multiple ballots in a plurality election
With all-the hubbub on the last election about vote validity, and hanging chads before that, the last thing we need is screw-up-able ballots.
IMHO we should not even consider any methods in which you can violate invariants on a paper ballot. That rules out FPTP, IRV, and any others where the user with pen-and-paper can enter an invalid state.
Err, I guess that rules out 321, which is my new favorite. Simple fix: just count multi Bad/Ok/Good entries toward that total. In the first round, you only look at "good" scores, ignoring ok/bad. Then in the bad round, same thing. This ensures a) you can't produce a bad ballot b) ballot counts stay orthogonal for each category c) multi-entries kinda average out.
E2: well I guess you can manage to screw up ANY style of paper ballot and violate some invariant. I guess it matters the difficulty of screwing it up and whether it's recoverable.
I agree that a likelihood of higher-than-normal percentage of spoiled ballots is a potential problem with IRV, at least with mail-in or in-person paper ballots. Voting machines shouldn't have a problem with it.
Approval is about as simple as it gets. In order to spoil the ballot you'd have to do something pretty strange like tear the ballot in half. Or with mail-in ballots, the usual things like not signing the envelope (assuming that's required in your state) or mailing it too late to arrive on time.
I don't see ballot spoiling as necessarily a show-stopper for using RCV on its own, but there are other compelling reasons not to use it (such as failing monotonicity).
And you've always been able to produce invalid ballots, like voting for two candidates when you're only allowed to pick one.
You're describing a UX problem which has UX solutions. It's not even remotely a justification for selecting a democratic procedure to express the will of the people.
Agreed but that's far from my only gripe with FPTP and IRV.
If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of changing the outcome.
Looking at the results of these simulations described in the article, and similar simulations using 'Bayesian regret', it seems that these issues tend to make cardinal systems better. Also, considering the various gotchas of voting systems, there is the famous Arrow impossibility theorem. However, it applies only to ordinal systems. There is no similar thing for cardinal systems.
Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless.
Indeed, that is a strong argument in favor of approval voting; if everybody votes strategically under score voting it reduces to approval voting, so why bother with the extra complexity of score voting? FWIW, I recall Arrow himself said in some interview that his personal favorite was approval voting.
Secondly, I'm not sure I understand the point about strength of preferences. Since everybody has the same range from within to assign preferences, it's all about the relative preferences among the candidates. Doesn't matter if I hate candidate X with the heat of a thousand suns, I can't give that candidate a score of -1000, only the minimum, just like everybody else.
With strength of preferences, some people will give their scores as 2,3,4 (out of 5) because nobody is perfect and nobody is truly the worst imaginable. But other people will give out scores 1,3,5 if they feel that has more effect, or because the are comfortable using score extremes everywhere else in life - with no real difference in the strength of conviction between those two groups of people.
And some people will use only 1,5 because they think giving every candidate except the one you hate a 5 increases the chance of the one you hate not getting in, even if they don't really like any of the others, or like one more than the others. It doesn't mean they are "pro" any of the candidates.
And some will give their favoured candidate 5 and everyone else 1 or 2.
Are the relative preference intensities expressed real? Everybody has the same range to vote Uber drivers, but apparently they're all nearly perfect. If a very successful campaigning organization convinces people that they have to give the Judean People's Front 0 for the People's Front of Judea to win even though the parties have similar policies and lots of Judeans strongly prefer them to the Romans, is the resulting distribution a real or artificial expression of the intensity of preferences?
From wiki
> Arrow originally rejected cardinal utility as a meaningful tool for expressing social welfare, and so focused his theorem on preference rankings, but later stated that a cardinal score system with three or four classes "is probably the best".
Again note that he's talking about social welfare and not voting.
(Putting candidates in the "leave off" set is the same as ranking them below a "none of the below" pseudo-candidate because it means they won't inherit unused vote shares during counting).
That solves your distinguish and C-dislike objections, and feels more honest when voting.
It also lets you feel fair when there are two candidates you both like equally and don't want to add to signal-favouritism when the results come out.
At a local club (where people are friendly so it's not meant to be competitive like in government), having to rank multiple loved and personally known candidates for a committee occupied by multiple people, when you like several equally, doesn't change the outcome at all, assuming they win, but it tends to greatly amplify the tiny, irrelevant biases fron the most petty things people have to draw on into very large differences in reported scores. This makes it looks like one person is very much preferred to be in charge of the rest of the committee or team, much more than is actually true, ie. it doesn't actually represent the voters intentions. The election outcome is representative, but the outsized score differences are interpreted wrongly. So this seeds ungrounded internal divisions after the vote, peculiar strategic voting at subsequent elections, and peculiar behaviours to chase after those "tiny, irrelevant biases". This isn't good for anyone involved. So it's good to allow voters to rank candidates equally for this reason too, if the voter genuinely feels that way.
Multi-member representation would be ideal, but I can see the appeal of having a single person represent you.
With hundreds/thousands(?) of ranked voting elections worldwide, with certainly millions of voters, you're statistically guaranteed to have that situation for some voter somewhere.
> Approval voting would seem to have the same convergence to a two party system as FPTP where you have a chamber composed of multiple members, a mayor or similar role would be different.
Not sure the voting method used for single-winner elections matter that much for the dynamics leading to a duopoly or not. I think convergence to a duopoly is most strongly influenced by winner-take-all districts. The solution to that, as you pointed out, is multi-member districts with proportional representation.
> but I can see the appeal of having a single person represent you
... assuming that 'your' party wins. Otherwise you have no representation at all and you feel disfranchised?
I'd say the major appeal of single-winner districts is that the districts are much smaller, and you have a better chance to get to know your own representative (again, assuming it's somebody you find broadly acceptable).
One could argue the same thing applies when a voter chooses whether or not to approve a vote for a candidate they don't like in order to prevent an even more disliked candidate from winning. To me, it seems a false choice either way (to order or to approve).
Possibly this a framing problem, given I've grown up in a system where IRV/STV is used, I naturally compare candidates, maybe someone growing up in a Approval voting system would naturally think about whether they like a specific candidate or not.
> ... assuming that 'your' party wins. Otherwise you have no representation at all and you feel disfranchised?
Having two houses where one uses STV and the other has single member districts does have its advantages as a "why not both" option.
That is not true, ordinal systems (including IRV) may allow weak ordering.
You kind of have to keep the whole voting system model in your head to decide.
You might not think it's very difficult but even ranking candidates is too complicated for most people. Anything more complicated than that has no chance in the real world.
Proponents of one system over the other worry that voters will get confused, or worse, that established groups that disagree with the reform could attack a new voting system as too complicated.
Personally I think this is part of the reason approval has gotten more traction than score or STAR systems, but who's to say. The Center for Election Science has better PR and web design than https://www.rangevoting.org/, which largely advocates for Score voting.
But it's a multifaceted issue. Academics argue over different methods, and even as a casual observer it seems pretty clear that no system is flawless.
For anyone who hasn't read "Gaming the Vote" by Poundstone, it's a useful introduction that discusses both the academic study and practical use of voting systems.
My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?