This is originally from a “comment” that I posted in response to an article about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). It seems to me that this makes a good brief article answering basic questions about IRV and advocating something much better – Approval Voting. Because this starts by answering questions about IRV, it might help get the attention of people who have heard about IRV, but who haven’t had the opportunity to hear about Approval Voting.

I would also suggest taking a look at my recent post that has a poll-introduction, with a link to the Condorcet Internet Voting Service poll on 7 voting-systems.

So, here are three brief comments about IRV followed by a brief introduction to Approval Voting:

1. “Ranked Choice Voting” (RCV) is a poor name for what used to be called “Instant Runoff” (IRV). There are many ranked-choice voting systems (often referred to as ranking-methods). When proponents re-named Instant Runoff to become “Ranked-Choice-Voting”, they seem to imply that IRV is the only ranking-method. Wrong.

And didn’t IRV’s proponents change its name soon after the fiasco in Burlington, Vermont?

2. Instant Runoff has problems that make it entirely unsuitable for current conditions. If you don’t believe me, ask the people of Burlington, Vermont who repealed IRV after only their second IRV election.

3. But, in spite of its other problems, IRV doesn’t violate one-person-one-vote, as required by the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. One-person-one-vote (1p1v) means that every voter should have the same voting-power. That issue came up when, in one state, some of the districts differed drastically in size, though each elected one person to office. That meant that the people in the small districts had many times the voting-power per person, as compared to the people in the large districts.

In no way does 1p1v have anything to do with the balloting, or how many candidates you get to make a mark for. When people use 1p1v as a criticism of alternative voting-systems, like Approval, Score, IRV, etc., they don’t know the meaning of 1p1v.

Why Approval is the best voting-system proposal

In Approval Voting, each voter may “approve” (by marking their names on the ballot) as many or as few candidates as they wants to. The candidate approved by the most people wins.

In other words, the most approved candidate wins – the candidate considered satisfactory by the most people. Does anyone want to argue with the desirability of that? Approval is best regarded as a rating-system, in which everyone can rate each candidate as “Approved” or “Not Approved”… “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory”.

Approval doesn’t require any new ballots, balloting-equipment, or software, other than turning off the provision to detect and reject “overvotes”. So, in addition to the basic benefits of Approval, the cost of changing to Approval is zero.