It would be great to be able to vote for every candidate in an election instead of only once and you can decide to upvote, downvote, or not vote for any candidate. This way you never “throw away” your vote and extreme/hated candidates can be downvoted so if im not a fan of any candidate but one is particularly awful I can downvote that one and not vote any I don’t like while still making my voice heard that I definitely don’t want this specific candidate
Edit: Combined Approval Voting is what I want and its used by to elect the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee and the Secretary General of the United Nations
Edit 2: You can learn about and try different voting methods in this amazing project https://ncase.me/ballot/
There are lots of really cool voting systems that don’t have the same weaknesses that first-past-the-post does. Check out https://ncase.me/ballot/ if you want a fun interactive explanation of several.
CGP Grey has multiple videos explaining different voting systems as well. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqs5ohhass_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9_ktRg
I will always upvote that ncase ballot link, it’s so well-written.
Lots of people here are arguing for Ranked Choice, but Nicky’s write-up shows that even though it’s still better than the US’s first-past-the-post system, something like Approval or Score voting are much better options.
I’ve long thought Condorcet is at least very close to being the absolute best election method. Nice to see it validated here!
Nicky Case is amazing. I didn’t know she made a project on this. Thanks!
In the epilogue she says we haven’t tested scoring methods.
But in my local county council elections we had something to that degree. Every candidate (multiple candidates per party and independents) had three boxes. And every elector had 12 or 20 or something crosses to distribute. So you could give 3, 2, 1 or 0 crosses to a candidate.
Maybe the difference is, that didn’t yield a single winner but elected members of the council.
Which is also a much more glaring issue with fptp systems: not the race for president, but the fact that there are only 2 parties in parliament.