> Unlike its competitor, ranked-choice voting, approval voting doesn’t require new machines, ballots or hardware. ... It’s a sensible, intuitive and tested appr

> Unlike its competitor, ranked-choice voting, approval voting doesn’t require new machines, ballots or hardware. ... It’s a sensible, intuitive and tested approach that every voting machine in America could execute tomorrow. I understand the desire to be pragmatic and accept the reality of voting machines as they exist in America today, but I also think that any proposal which entrenches a dependency on voting machines is potentially a dead end for democracy. Even if you could guarantee that all the software and hardware used in voting machines was open for security researchers to audit, and there were no bugs or vulnerabilities, you would still be introducing the attack surface of people being able to lie and claim there are vulnerabilities and that the election had been stolen. Once we accept the premise that votes should be cast without using a machine (at least for 99% of voters who are physically capable) and counted by hand, consideration needs to be given to what that counting process looks like. Certainly approval voting is vastly preferable to ranked systems, since approval ballots can be split between different counting stations whose sub-totals can be easily summed, but the actual management of those physical ballots can be tricky, since counters either need to keep track with a tally system or group ballots into one of 2^N different piles (given N different candidates). An alternative system, which has all the benefits of approval voting (same ballot design, solves the spoiler problem, summable sub-totals), is Asset Voting. Basically it works the same as FPTP, except that after the initial count, candidates are eliminated (from least to most votes) and they can choose to redistribute their votes to another remaining candidate. In terms of counting, this can be done by hand using only N piles for N candidates, the way that countries have done it for hundreds of years and many still do to this day.