I'm also libertarian (leaning, in the sense I have voted for libertarian candidates in multiple elections at multiple levels, but not most of the time) but do r

I'm also libertarian (leaning, in the sense I have voted for libertarian candidates in multiple elections at multiple levels, but not most of the time) but do research on this. I am not sure what to say to allay your concerns, except to say that mathematically/statistically speaking approval voting is what I would implement after a rating system, which I think is the best but also maybe the most cumbersome. I personally don't really care about the political impetus behind changing the election format (not to say I don't care about politics, just that in the case of alternative voting systems the standard US format is almost the worst you could do). Anything that moves the US toward something better would be an improvement. My one concern is that for whatever reason ranking systems seem to be the thing being pushed most, when approval or rating systems would probably be better. Changing to an approval system would probably be the easiest way to increase 3rd party viability at the moment. Which of those 3rd parties would benefit is a different issue, but approval systems allow people to diversify their expressed preferences, so at the very least it wouldn't be worse for 3rd party candidates. The basic issue is that plurality voting is a very poor measure of preference. Imagine if you were asked to measure height of 5 people in the room, 3 of whom are over 6 feet 10 inches tall. You could report how tall they are; this is most similar to a rating system. You could rank order their heights; this preserves rank ordering information but not anything about absolute difference, so the two people who are 7'2" and 7'1" look as different as the people who are 7'2" and 5'2". You could also ask people to just mark which are taller than 6'10", which at least acknowledges that more than one person could be taller than 6'10", and preserves some info about absolute height. Or, you could do as is standard, and just indicate who is tallest, which doesn't preserve much information at all about height.