If by "moderates" you mean "most liked" then I'm not sure what the problem is here. The point of voting is to find the most universally agreed upon ruler. You may call this unfair, but I would say that it is MORE unfair to give advantage to fringe groups rather than giving advantage to the masses. I thought the point of democracies was about having rule by the masses. If you think fringe groups should have the advantage I'd like to hear your argument.
I'm not sure what gave you the impression I think that. My comments clearly suggest that my view is that STAR > Approval-to-runoff > Approval > RCV-IRV > Plurality. My reasoning is that I place a very high value on the condorcet and favorite betrayal criteria.
As for the condorcet winner, that is quite hard actually. But if we consider a weak condorcet winner (where it is true 90+% of the time), that isn't as hard. I do think simplicity, transparency, and reduced vulnerability to strategy is a worthwhile trade-off for a strong condorcet winner. But of course, this is just my personal opinion and what's the preferred optima depends a lot on personal preferences.
We'll you'll be happy then! :)
Because this is commonly believed but actually totally untrue. There's an entire book about it, "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Morris P. Fiorina.
The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal. But whenever you give a sliding scale in surveys, it becomes abundantly clear that the population is centrist -- unimodal. Even for gun control and abortion, the most hot-button issues.
SHOCKING! (I laughed a little too much at this comment)
But this is also why surveyists tend to ask the "strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree" questions. Because it can measure the temperature better. This is effectively a type of cardinal voting too. After all, voting theory is also known as "social choice theory."
But I definitely agree that in practice we find more normal like distributions in preference. Which is why I find it odd when commenters argue that other voting systems "give advantage" to "moderates" or "centrists" as if this is not in reality "gives 'advantage' to candidates that have low variance to the mean opinion." (aka, the most representative). Isn't that the goal of voting systems? To be the most representative?
You have those insisting that the population is divided and there just aren't that many centrists, and then you have those insisting that the population is centrist and there aren't that many extremists.
And they're always looking at the same exact bell curve, and then the first group decides the center is only an arbitrary 10% wide so most people are divided (45% on either side), and the second group decides that the center is an arbitrary 80% wide, so only a small number of people are extremist (10% on either side).
It's the same damn bell curve.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/top/?t=all
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/cw2bbh...
The RCV people's main criticism of Approval is that it doesn't allow you to express different levels of support, and they aren't totally wrong (even though their preferred mechanism of IRV doesn't get them there, either).
I think (without data, happy to be proven wrong) that the US population is fairly strongly bimodal on most issues. Many issues that people care a lot about (for better or worse...) have two clear centers of gravity,
e.g. for gun control and abortion most people are in the orbit of a "mostly ban" or "mostly allow" group, with very few people falling into some nuanced middle ground.