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> we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of worldviews First past the poll voting with primaries encourages (forces) politicians to go to the extrem

> we seem to have a tendency towards polar vortices of worldviews First past the poll voting with primaries encourages (forces) politicians to go to the extremes. Ranked choice voting can reduce extremism. It’s also cheaper for tax payers as it eliminates expensive and wildly discriminatory/disenfranchising runoff elections.

Freedom2 3y ago
Many Americans already don't understand progressive tax as a concept. How can we realistically expect them to understand ranked choice voting?
- tacon 3y ago
  Proof by example: Alaska already does ranked choice voting https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    True, but that doesn't actually establish that voters understand how it works. IIRC, they've only had it for a short time, so there's not much of a track record to establish that voters are casting votes in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and desires.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  [flagged]
- ACow_Adonis 3y ago
  The same way other nations do?
  - foofie 3y ago
    It's vital that a democratic nation fully understands the method they use to elect representatives. People need to understand how their vote maps to a preference, and how their votes are tallied to determine who wins and who doesn't. If a significant share of the electorate does not understand the vote tallying process and expects an outcome different from the one that actually resulted from counting the votes, you will get accusations of vote fraud and election tampering.
    - flir 3y ago
      Seems like you've already got that problem with FPTP. (What I'm getting at is that the problem's not the voting system, it's something else).
    - psd1 3y ago
      Maybe, but on a maslow pyramid of healthy democracy, that would be a tier above an informed electorate and critical thinking skills. If you figure out how to develop those, please include Britain on your speaking tour.
- healthdare 3y ago
  [dead]
- godelski 3y ago
  1) Americans don't understand progressive tax because they are constantly being bombarded with information as to what it means. If you watch Fox news daily you will have a misunderstanding on the matter. Take care to make generalizations when you see things like knowledge differences divided between party lines. People aren't different, but the information they get is. 2) Many social choice experts advocate for cardinal systems over ordinal. Approval is quite popular due to its simplicity and effectiveness while Star or Score improve on alignment but all of these are substantially better than the current system. Cardinal has the advantage in the tabulation being that you do not need multiple elections (exception of Star, which is strictly 2 elections), and you can do a parallelized reduce sum tabulation. So algorithmically it is easy to understand (sum columns/candidates, pick largest total: argmax(column sum)). That has implications for transparency and election security. Some people are convinced these methods are harder for people to understand but I'd refer you back to point 1 and add that we're also very used to these systems as we're currently using a cardinal voting system on HN.
  - psd1 3y ago
    It is plain from the stories of fox news orphans that information diet can ruin good people, but I refuse to believe that people aren't different. I rebut your thesis thus: Oskar Schindler.
    - godelski 3y ago
      What do you think the main difference in people is? Biological? Because I'm saying environmental. I'm not sure why you reference Schindler. Certainly there is a distribution and I'm not claiming people are clones (I don't think you are either). So outliers aren't proof of anything, to either argument.
      - psd1 3y ago
        I think Dawkins' model of memes is helpful. I'm going to use freighted language and examples for brevity. Readers, please be generous; I'm doing conservatism because it's the topic on hand, but this applies equally to progressivism. A meme is the fundamental unit of transmissible culture - a catchy tune, laying napkins on the lunch table, the concept of punishment for wrongdoers. Memes are hosted in sentient minds. A baby's first memes come from its parents. Subsequently, from family, babysitters, toys, telly, other children, books. Memes are virulent to different degrees. An earworm is very infectious, but greeting people with "howdie doodie" is not particularly so. A meme may fade away from a host in time, or be displaced by another meme, or last a long time in the host's mind. Individuals are more or less susceptible to any given meme. This is influenced by the memes they have already. Some memes reinforce each other, and are often found together and transmitted together - for example, the meme for belief in god tends to cohabit with the meme for prayer, and we observe them being transmitted together. The belief in a holy text tends to confer resistance to displacement on proximate memes such as the belief in a personal deity, and also tends to cause the host to expend effort on transmitting the meme complex. These meme complexes are self-sustaining. We might expect meme complexes that include dogma to confer great tenacity on accompanying memes. Good luck convincing a fundie that the earth is old; their memes inoculate them against arguments. So we have the fox news complex: initial infection is through mild right-wing memes, affect the host's behaviour, and increase susceptibility to secondary infections such as "election was stolen" or "9/11 was an inside job". Someone with a very strong base set of memes, such as critical thinking or compassion, is much less susceptible to all the constituent memes of the fox complex. But someone with a weak base meme type - say, consumerism and apathy to books - is more easily infected. I'm not aware of any research in this field. Do please improve my understanding!
chii 3y ago
> First past the poll might be a typo, but it's first past the post , not poll; in case someone else gets it confused not knowing the term.
- schneems 3y ago
  IDK the rules but I’m unable to edit the post anymore, thanks for the assist.
js8 3y ago
You can go much further and adopt more direct democratic approaches, for example, referendums, which focus more on actual issues than on which individual gets the power. This can also reduce extremism, as it requires (and causes) a wider debate (and thus mutual understanding) in society. There is a historic reason why US and UK suffer from this problem the most, because they were built primarily on liberalism and not democracy. (Although to be fair, many US states has actually have quite a bit of direct democracy as a remainder from progressive era at the beginning at 20th century, and we would probably find that in issues that are put to referendums, people tend to vote much less by the partisan divides.)
- tyre 3y ago
  counterpoint to referendums: Brexit, which has been a disaster for Britain.
  - js8 3y ago
    Sure, counterpoint to freedom is that you can make a mistake. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have that freedom. The Brexit referendum was organized (and supported) by the conservative government, which wanted more neoliberalism. It was more of a populist stunt than the expression of the will of the people. That's not true to the spirit of referendums or direct democracy - these should exist to allow people to discuss, raise and vote on issues aside from the government.
    - psd1 3y ago
      That characterisation is imprecise to the point of being misleading; may I tell the story in detail? I particularly rebut any suggestion that the Tories organised the referendum. That's only true at the most superficial reading. The whole farrago (pun intended) was founded by fringe nutters in the party, offered as a sop by the party leadership, and co-opted and orchestrated by interests inimical to the nation. (There is a case to answer for treason.) Ever since the first referendum to join the EU in 1975, the anti-Europe faction of the Tory party was muttering in dark corners. They gathered political strength at the fringe, slowly bolstered by drips of propaganda such as Boris Johnson's baseless claim, as a journalist, that the EU regulated the bendiness of bananas. In 2013, a nameless senior Tory in the orthodoxy coined the phrase "swivel-eyed loons". Boris Johnson, may he swing, is every bit as much a fabricator as Donald Trump. If truth enters his speech, it's because it got lost. _Aside: English politics has always been a straight left-right axis, with the left split between Labour and Lib Dems but the right united in the Tories. Labour had always had a strong socially-conservative constituency, but social conservatism has never been a campaign theme, AFAICR, beyond "tough on crime", which is a cheap vote-winner for anyone anywhere. The Labour Party is relatively new, but the Tories and Lib Dems trace their ancestry back to the same Tory-Whig axis that America inherited. Brexit turned that axis into a quadrant, with the LDs united but with the Tories and Labour split._ After they dicked over the plebs with austerity in a recession, the nation was angry with neoliberals, and the anti-EU gang fed on that. Not without reason, given how Greece got the shaft to protect German investors. Campaigning for an outright majority in 2013, Cameron (a widely-used nickname for Pigfucker) offered the loons a referendum to keep them inside the tent; if the right split, it would have been a huge embarrassment for him. At that point, an anti-EU platform would not have taken many votes, but they would mostly have been Tory votes. The Tories were already a neoliberal govenment, and they were blithely confident that they would win the referendum - it was a free hit for the loons, which was supposed to shut them up for another decade. Cameron had nothing to gain except silencing an annoying sideshow. He was already five years into an aggressive neoliberal strategy. He shrugged off the power of bullshit stories such as "bendy bananas" and "Romanian squatters", despite the fact that they were in the Sun (proles), the Mail (proles with pretensions of intelligence), the Spectator (unintelligent toffs), and the Telegraph (obedient middle class). My apologies if you take the Spectator for the cartoons. Despite their swivelly eyes, the Leave campaign acquired a huge war chest - namely, money from forex speculators and from Russia, which tells you exactly who benefits. _Aside: London has been a haven for Russian money since glasnost. Russian oligarchs had been funding the Tories for years. Russia had total access to English politics up until the 2022 sanctions. The report from the inquiry into Leave campaign irregularities was suppressed._ The Leave backers brought in Steve Bannon, fresh from Trump's campaign. Bannon is not a great talent, but, in the milieu of English political campaigns, he was ahead of the curve. England was unprepared for bare-faced lies being astroturfed on Facebook. Meanwhile, Cameron burned his war chest on fucking leaflet drops. Cameron failed to generate any positive talking points, and expected to win by default. He argued that we'd become poor if we left Europe, which did little to sway working-class voters whom he had spent 6 years impoverishing. This arrogance was reflected by Gove's soundbite "people in this country have had enough of experts". A new constituency emerged: "gammon", named for their ruddy complexions; choleric boomers, typically educated and middle-class but who long ago waved goodbye to curious intelligence, susceptible to and active on Facebook. These people are not as bad as your American fox news zombies, but of the same ilk - spittle-flecked rants at the breakfast table, "simple common sense", highly emotional yet sublimely certain of their own rationality. These chumps did not have a legitimate grievance against the government or the EU; their apoplexy was inchoate; they were merely channeled by the grifters. Combine the gammon with the uninformed working class plebs, who bought into the threats of waves of gypsies arriving from Romania and mixed it with baseline sentiment against immigrants from all countries, and also the huge constituency that just wanted to give the arrogant neoliberals a black eye, and you have a win against the odds for Leave. Excuse my rambling. It's hard to be concise when you're incandescent with fury.
nvm0n2 3y ago
That's the wrong way around, I don't think any conventional analysis of voting systems concludes that. FPTP forces parties to the center, because they have to be pre-formed coalitions before going to the polls. Single issue parties and fringe parties end up with nothing in FPTP. That's why the usual argument for PR is that it allows smaller (fringe/extreme) parties to exist and have influence, so represents minorities better. In practice this is what we see. Countries with PR often have very powerful fringe or single issue parties (often the Greens), whereas in countries with FPTP the main parties are all big tents that just represent the centre-left or centre-right.
- schneems 3y ago
  > with FPTP the main parties are all big tents that just represent the centre-left or centre-right. FPTP by itself might not be so bad, but combine it with primaries and you’ve got a recipe for extremism and scorched earth politics. Now throw in gerrymandering and we’ve got a wildly unrepresentative election process. Don’t get me started on the electoral college either. I’m for a national popular vote.
- tremon 3y ago
  FPTP essentially means that the actual government is operated as a time-limited dictatorship, since it's a winner-takes-all system. That means that once the elections are over, there is no need for actual politicking and bridge-building, the reigning champion or party can do whatever they like (according to some, even including killing their rivals /s). In multi-parliamentary systems, the politicking does not end when the elections are over.
zestyping 3y ago
First Past The Post is the cause of many of the political ills in the United States, and I used to think RCV was the answer. But it is a disaster: 1. The rate of spoiled ballots goes way up, and disproportionately so in lower-income areas (https://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html#minn https://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html#minn). Suppressing 3 to 5% of the vote in poor districts would be devastating; the winning margin is smaller than that in lots of elections. 2. With RCV, sometimes voting for someone you like will make them lose (https://rangevoting.org/ClayIrv2.html https://rangevoting.org/ClayIrv2.html). 3. RCV doesn't break us out of two-party dominance. Once a third-party candidate gains more support, they can still be a spoiler under RCV, forcing you to choose between the lesser of two evils. 4. Audits are essential to ensure an accurate count, but RCV makes them vastly more difficult because you can't add up the votes from smaller districts to get the overall result. 5. Let's have voting machine companies write more unreviewed proprietary software and make it more complicated, that sounds like a great idea! There's a much better method that actually does help us escape two-party rule. It's simple, cheap, well-tested, accessible, easy to understand, and doesn't even require changing any ballots or software. That method is Approval Voting (https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...). Simply: • Use the same ballots as we do today • Let people vote for all the candidates they like • Count all the votes Done. No new ballots, no new procedures, no new software, and extremely simple to explain to voters. Here's the intuition for why this works. When you vote using the current system, expressing support for one candidate requires you to withdraw your support from another candidate. RCV is the same in that you can only have one first choice: if you want to rank one candidate higher, you must rank another candidate lower. That's what keeps you from voting for your true favourite. With Approval Voting, your decisions about each individual candidate are fully independent: how you vote on one candidate has no effect on any other candidate. So you can express your full support for your favourite without harming the "lesser evil" candidate. RCV is frequently criticized by mathematicians and economists, who are familiar with its many problems. This is one of those uncommon situations where the theorists and pragmatists agree: Approval is better from both perspectives.

Freedom2 3y ago

Many Americans already don't understand progressive tax as a concept. How can we realistically expect them to understand ranked choice voting?

tacon 3y ago
Proof by example: Alaska already does ranked choice voting https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
- gnicholas 3y ago
  True, but that doesn't actually establish that voters understand how it works. IIRC, they've only had it for a short time, so there's not much of a track record to establish that voters are casting votes in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and desires.
edgyquant 3y ago
[flagged]
ACow_Adonis 3y ago
The same way other nations do?
- foofie 3y ago
  It's vital that a democratic nation fully understands the method they use to elect representatives. People need to understand how their vote maps to a preference, and how their votes are tallied to determine who wins and who doesn't. If a significant share of the electorate does not understand the vote tallying process and expects an outcome different from the one that actually resulted from counting the votes, you will get accusations of vote fraud and election tampering.
  - flir 3y ago
    Seems like you've already got that problem with FPTP. (What I'm getting at is that the problem's not the voting system, it's something else).
  - psd1 3y ago
    Maybe, but on a maslow pyramid of healthy democracy, that would be a tier above an informed electorate and critical thinking skills. If you figure out how to develop those, please include Britain on your speaking tour.
healthdare 3y ago
[dead]
godelski 3y ago
1) Americans don't understand progressive tax because they are constantly being bombarded with information as to what it means. If you watch Fox news daily you will have a misunderstanding on the matter. Take care to make generalizations when you see things like knowledge differences divided between party lines. People aren't different, but the information they get is. 2) Many social choice experts advocate for cardinal systems over ordinal. Approval is quite popular due to its simplicity and effectiveness while Star or Score improve on alignment but all of these are substantially better than the current system. Cardinal has the advantage in the tabulation being that you do not need multiple elections (exception of Star, which is strictly 2 elections), and you can do a parallelized reduce sum tabulation. So algorithmically it is easy to understand (sum columns/candidates, pick largest total: argmax(column sum)). That has implications for transparency and election security. Some people are convinced these methods are harder for people to understand but I'd refer you back to point 1 and add that we're also very used to these systems as we're currently using a cardinal voting system on HN.
- psd1 3y ago
  It is plain from the stories of fox news orphans that information diet can ruin good people, but I refuse to believe that people aren't different. I rebut your thesis thus: Oskar Schindler.
  - godelski 3y ago
    What do you think the main difference in people is? Biological? Because I'm saying environmental. I'm not sure why you reference Schindler. Certainly there is a distribution and I'm not claiming people are clones (I don't think you are either). So outliers aren't proof of anything, to either argument.
    - psd1 3y ago
      I think Dawkins' model of memes is helpful. I'm going to use freighted language and examples for brevity. Readers, please be generous; I'm doing conservatism because it's the topic on hand, but this applies equally to progressivism. A meme is the fundamental unit of transmissible culture - a catchy tune, laying napkins on the lunch table, the concept of punishment for wrongdoers. Memes are hosted in sentient minds. A baby's first memes come from its parents. Subsequently, from family, babysitters, toys, telly, other children, books. Memes are virulent to different degrees. An earworm is very infectious, but greeting people with "howdie doodie" is not particularly so. A meme may fade away from a host in time, or be displaced by another meme, or last a long time in the host's mind. Individuals are more or less susceptible to any given meme. This is influenced by the memes they have already. Some memes reinforce each other, and are often found together and transmitted together - for example, the meme for belief in god tends to cohabit with the meme for prayer, and we observe them being transmitted together. The belief in a holy text tends to confer resistance to displacement on proximate memes such as the belief in a personal deity, and also tends to cause the host to expend effort on transmitting the meme complex. These meme complexes are self-sustaining. We might expect meme complexes that include dogma to confer great tenacity on accompanying memes. Good luck convincing a fundie that the earth is old; their memes inoculate them against arguments. So we have the fox news complex: initial infection is through mild right-wing memes, affect the host's behaviour, and increase susceptibility to secondary infections such as "election was stolen" or "9/11 was an inside job". Someone with a very strong base set of memes, such as critical thinking or compassion, is much less susceptible to all the constituent memes of the fox complex. But someone with a weak base meme type - say, consumerism and apathy to books - is more easily infected. I'm not aware of any research in this field. Do please improve my understanding!

chii 3y ago

> First past the poll might be a typo, but it's first past the post , not poll; in case someone else gets it confused not knowing the term.

schneems 3y ago
IDK the rules but I’m unable to edit the post anymore, thanks for the assist.

js8 3y ago

You can go much further and adopt more direct democratic approaches, for example, referendums, which focus more on actual issues than on which individual gets the power. This can also reduce extremism, as it requires (and causes) a wider debate (and thus mutual understanding) in society. There is a historic reason why US and UK suffer from this problem the most, because they were built primarily on liberalism and not democracy. (Although to be fair, many US states has actually have quite a bit of direct democracy as a remainder from progressive era at the beginning at 20th century, and we would probably find that in issues that are put to referendums, people tend to vote much less by the partisan divides.)

tyre 3y ago
counterpoint to referendums: Brexit, which has been a disaster for Britain.
- js8 3y ago
  Sure, counterpoint to freedom is that you can make a mistake. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have that freedom. The Brexit referendum was organized (and supported) by the conservative government, which wanted more neoliberalism. It was more of a populist stunt than the expression of the will of the people. That's not true to the spirit of referendums or direct democracy - these should exist to allow people to discuss, raise and vote on issues aside from the government.
  - psd1 3y ago
    That characterisation is imprecise to the point of being misleading; may I tell the story in detail? I particularly rebut any suggestion that the Tories organised the referendum. That's only true at the most superficial reading. The whole farrago (pun intended) was founded by fringe nutters in the party, offered as a sop by the party leadership, and co-opted and orchestrated by interests inimical to the nation. (There is a case to answer for treason.) Ever since the first referendum to join the EU in 1975, the anti-Europe faction of the Tory party was muttering in dark corners. They gathered political strength at the fringe, slowly bolstered by drips of propaganda such as Boris Johnson's baseless claim, as a journalist, that the EU regulated the bendiness of bananas. In 2013, a nameless senior Tory in the orthodoxy coined the phrase "swivel-eyed loons". Boris Johnson, may he swing, is every bit as much a fabricator as Donald Trump. If truth enters his speech, it's because it got lost. _Aside: English politics has always been a straight left-right axis, with the left split between Labour and Lib Dems but the right united in the Tories. Labour had always had a strong socially-conservative constituency, but social conservatism has never been a campaign theme, AFAICR, beyond "tough on crime", which is a cheap vote-winner for anyone anywhere. The Labour Party is relatively new, but the Tories and Lib Dems trace their ancestry back to the same Tory-Whig axis that America inherited. Brexit turned that axis into a quadrant, with the LDs united but with the Tories and Labour split._ After they dicked over the plebs with austerity in a recession, the nation was angry with neoliberals, and the anti-EU gang fed on that. Not without reason, given how Greece got the shaft to protect German investors. Campaigning for an outright majority in 2013, Cameron (a widely-used nickname for Pigfucker) offered the loons a referendum to keep them inside the tent; if the right split, it would have been a huge embarrassment for him. At that point, an anti-EU platform would not have taken many votes, but they would mostly have been Tory votes. The Tories were already a neoliberal govenment, and they were blithely confident that they would win the referendum - it was a free hit for the loons, which was supposed to shut them up for another decade. Cameron had nothing to gain except silencing an annoying sideshow. He was already five years into an aggressive neoliberal strategy. He shrugged off the power of bullshit stories such as "bendy bananas" and "Romanian squatters", despite the fact that they were in the Sun (proles), the Mail (proles with pretensions of intelligence), the Spectator (unintelligent toffs), and the Telegraph (obedient middle class). My apologies if you take the Spectator for the cartoons. Despite their swivelly eyes, the Leave campaign acquired a huge war chest - namely, money from forex speculators and from Russia, which tells you exactly who benefits. _Aside: London has been a haven for Russian money since glasnost. Russian oligarchs had been funding the Tories for years. Russia had total access to English politics up until the 2022 sanctions. The report from the inquiry into Leave campaign irregularities was suppressed._ The Leave backers brought in Steve Bannon, fresh from Trump's campaign. Bannon is not a great talent, but, in the milieu of English political campaigns, he was ahead of the curve. England was unprepared for bare-faced lies being astroturfed on Facebook. Meanwhile, Cameron burned his war chest on fucking leaflet drops. Cameron failed to generate any positive talking points, and expected to win by default. He argued that we'd become poor if we left Europe, which did little to sway working-class voters whom he had spent 6 years impoverishing. This arrogance was reflected by Gove's soundbite "people in this country have had enough of experts". A new constituency emerged: "gammon", named for their ruddy complexions; choleric boomers, typically educated and middle-class but who long ago waved goodbye to curious intelligence, susceptible to and active on Facebook. These people are not as bad as your American fox news zombies, but of the same ilk - spittle-flecked rants at the breakfast table, "simple common sense", highly emotional yet sublimely certain of their own rationality. These chumps did not have a legitimate grievance against the government or the EU; their apoplexy was inchoate; they were merely channeled by the grifters. Combine the gammon with the uninformed working class plebs, who bought into the threats of waves of gypsies arriving from Romania and mixed it with baseline sentiment against immigrants from all countries, and also the huge constituency that just wanted to give the arrogant neoliberals a black eye, and you have a win against the odds for Leave. Excuse my rambling. It's hard to be concise when you're incandescent with fury.

nvm0n2 3y ago

That's the wrong way around, I don't think any conventional analysis of voting systems concludes that. FPTP forces parties to the center, because they have to be pre-formed coalitions before going to the polls. Single issue parties and fringe parties end up with nothing in FPTP. That's why the usual argument for PR is that it allows smaller (fringe/extreme) parties to exist and have influence, so represents minorities better. In practice this is what we see. Countries with PR often have very powerful fringe or single issue parties (often the Greens), whereas in countries with FPTP the main parties are all big tents that just represent the centre-left or centre-right.

schneems 3y ago
> with FPTP the main parties are all big tents that just represent the centre-left or centre-right. FPTP by itself might not be so bad, but combine it with primaries and you’ve got a recipe for extremism and scorched earth politics. Now throw in gerrymandering and we’ve got a wildly unrepresentative election process. Don’t get me started on the electoral college either. I’m for a national popular vote.
tremon 3y ago
FPTP essentially means that the actual government is operated as a time-limited dictatorship, since it's a winner-takes-all system. That means that once the elections are over, there is no need for actual politicking and bridge-building, the reigning champion or party can do whatever they like (according to some, even including killing their rivals /s). In multi-parliamentary systems, the politicking does not end when the elections are over.

zestyping 3y ago

First Past The Post is the cause of many of the political ills in the United States, and I used to think RCV was the answer. But it is a disaster: 1. The rate of spoiled ballots goes way up, and disproportionately so in lower-income areas (https://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html#minn https://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html#minn). Suppressing 3 to 5% of the vote in poor districts would be devastating; the winning margin is smaller than that in lots of elections. 2. With RCV, sometimes voting for someone you like will make them lose (https://rangevoting.org/ClayIrv2.html https://rangevoting.org/ClayIrv2.html). 3. RCV doesn't break us out of two-party dominance. Once a third-party candidate gains more support, they can still be a spoiler under RCV, forcing you to choose between the lesser of two evils. 4. Audits are essential to ensure an accurate count, but RCV makes them vastly more difficult because you can't add up the votes from smaller districts to get the overall result. 5. Let's have voting machine companies write more unreviewed proprietary software and make it more complicated, that sounds like a great idea! There's a much better method that actually does help us escape two-party rule. It's simple, cheap, well-tested, accessible, easy to understand, and doesn't even require changing any ballots or software. That method is Approval Voting (https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...). Simply: • Use the same ballots as we do today • Let people vote for all the candidates they like • Count all the votes Done. No new ballots, no new procedures, no new software, and extremely simple to explain to voters. Here's the intuition for why this works. When you vote using the current system, expressing support for one candidate requires you to withdraw your support from another candidate. RCV is the same in that you can only have one first choice: if you want to rank one candidate higher, you must rank another candidate lower. That's what keeps you from voting for your true favourite. With Approval Voting, your decisions about each individual candidate are fully independent: how you vote on one candidate has no effect on any other candidate. So you can express your full support for your favourite without harming the "lesser evil" candidate. RCV is frequently criticized by mathematicians and economists, who are familiar with its many problems. This is one of those uncommon situations where the theorists and pragmatists agree: Approval is better from both perspectives.