this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Politics
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Here's approval voting:
vote for everyone you like
Don't vote for everyone you don't like
most votes wins
That's it.
Here's a more detailed article.
Here's some simulations demonstrating how well-behaved different voting systems are.
Approval vs RCV in a presidential primary
Chicago mayor primary using four different voting methods
Basically, "choose one" voting sucks balls for a bunch of reasons, so people have spent a lot of time coming up with different ways to vote. Approval voting gets pretty much the same results as all the other improvements, while requiring a hell of a lot less effort and being way easier to understand.
Add in the fact that it's super easy to tweak it for use with multi-winner elections or party-proportional elections and it's just amazing to me that people champion the more complicated methods.
Oh I get it. Imo that's comparable to like ranked choice voting.
So, the thing is, isn't not.
BUT, it's perfectly fine if you don't want to learn the differences between systems and all the little details and that stuff. In fact, it would be weird if everyone was as interested in voting and representation systems as I was.
But this lack of interest is exactly why the voting system needs to be dummy simple. Even people who actively dislike learning should be able to fully understand how the voting system works and what kinds of problems it has. (They all have problems.)
With approval, well, I already explained it. Vote for everyone you like, most votes wins. That's it. No elimination rounds, no counting and recounting. It's just plain obvious how it works.
And the thing is, when you get really nerdy and all the different voting methods, it turns out all the good ones end up with pretty similar results, so why make things more complicated than you have to? Approval works.
I mean imo it depends on the area. In an ideal world I think each community would discuss and decide for themselves which democratic models works best based on their local material conditions