Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation.
Doesn’t seem to allow people to express their natural feelings. RCV does. I absolutely have a favorite. And I want to be able to encode that. I also have a 2nd choice, and so on.
Imagine a case where I really really want one guy, and between the remaining two I have a strong preference for one over the other. RCV lets me express that.
Approval would have been stuck. Should I mention the 2nd guy? I do want them if it came to having to choose but I’d hate to place them on even footing with my top top pick.
this is a common intuition-based fallacy. i'm an expert with almost 20 years of experience working in this field with various phd's in political science, math, and game theory. i explain this here:
tl;dr - for any two candidates, X and Y, the voters who approve only one of them express a "ranked preference" between them. and because those voters are, on average, a good statistical sample of the X-vs-Y preference of the entire electorate, approval voting turns out to measure voter preferences very accurately.
whereas instant runoff voting can actually have much bigger problems in preference detection because it only looks at one layer of preferences at a time. for example:
35% left center
33% right center
32% center
in this example, center is preferred to both the left and the right by a LANDSLIDE 2/3rds majority, yet is the first candidate eliminated. this happens because of "vote splitting" (spoiler effect) between the two more partisan candidates. so it might _feel_ like you expressed your preferences better. but you didn't really.
and what about STRATEGIC VOTING?
if right wins, then the left supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that. and if left wins, then right supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that.
approval voting satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion", which means it cannot possibly hurt you to support your sincere favorite candidate.
A major, important difference between the two is that a median HN user can read the Wikipedia page on STAR voting and come away not fully understanding it and have further questions (do score difference magnitudes matter in the runoff? Or only which is higher?).
Meanwhile approval voting is exhaustively explained by "vote for as many candidates as you like. Candidate with the most votes wins."
A "more optimal" voting system doesn't exist in a vacuum, public understanding and trust make a voting system more optimal. Just not more mathematically optimal.
cardinal (rated) voting methods are better than ordinal (ranked). so score voting, approval voting, and star voting are all good.
approval voting is just score voting on a 0-1 binary scale. star voting is score voting on a 0-5 scale, followed by an "instant runoff" between the top two highest rated candidates.
> public understanding and trust make a voting system more optimal.
star voting: score the candidates from 0 - 5 and the winner is the majority favorite between the two highest rated overall.
there's no risk with public understanding here. i've worked on this subject since 2006, and conducted exit polls with score voting ballots within months of getting into this issue. people understand it just fine. it's radically simpler than ranking.
Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation.
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/