> I'm sorry, but I find this concern a bit in bad taste.
And I'm sorry that you feel this way, as I was not trying to insult Approval Voting (which, as I indicated, I would strongly support over FPTP) nor trying to detract from the positive contribution you have made to this discussion.
> The same thing about the second concern (you add the Republican to your ranking).
I think that, at least conceptually, it is easier for a voter to say "I support Hillary more than Romney" or even to give those candidates different scores out of 10, than to say "My 'approval threshold' is calibrated such that Romney is below it and Hillary is above it".
You're probably right that in (some?) ordinal systems there are counter-intuitive outcomes that can result from ranking a less preferred candidate too highly, or even from ranking them at all (if the system doesn't require an exhaustive ranking of all candidates), but the question being asked of the voter at least doesn't require them to pick a parameter for which there doesn't appear to be a "correct" value even assuming they have perfectly formed opinions of each candidate.
> the benefit of STAR is that is is extremely resistant to strategies.
I would have difficulty predicting what would happen if I under/over-voted a candidate I grudgingly accepted, so my instinct would be to vote honestly (which is probably the best outcome of a voting system given the impossibility of a strategy-free system), but my objection to STAR is that it is harder to fill in and count by hand (requiring 2^6N piles, or the use of N calculators).
> Ordinal systems like STV and IRV have multi rounds.
Agreed. From that perspective, Approval Voting is clearly preferable.
> I should highlight, again, that the US has had STV in the past and then many of those cities went back to FPTP because it was complicated and didn't solve the issues they wanted to.
I know of examples of IRV being abandoned, which I assume is what you're referring to here. (Voting system terminology probably differs around the world, but I tend to think of STV as being a multi-winner system and IRV being single-winner).
For me, the most important property of a voting system is for it to have a strong chance of being adopted, which is the only reason I support more US jurisdiction adopting IRV, but you're right that there is a potential "well-poisoning" effect where a reform gets adopted and then quickly abandoned, harming future reform efforts. This risk has to be balanced, though, against that of a less popular reform being proposed and failing to be adopted, which is likely to be portrayed as a lack of support for any reform, and that could be just as harmful.
> I'm not sure why you felt it was important to explain this to me when I've already demonstrated a working knowledge and at this point I also feel that you ignored a good portion of my previous post that was about strong and weak spoilers.
I'm again really sorry that you seem to have taken this so personally, as I do respect your position. What I was explaining was how Asset Voting works, since I suspect most readers of this discussion would not have heard of it and I didn't know that you were familiar with it. The reason I didn't include anything in my reply about strong and weak spoilers is that I agreed with you and didn't have anything to add. You, on the other hand, completely skipped over the direct question at the start of my comment, asking you to clarify your point on parliamentary systems, but it seems that wasn't important to you.
> That's just making collusion rings easier. Again, let's look at the 2016 and 2020 elections. That's just letting the parties dictate who can run in the elections.
Asset Voting doesn't require the existence of parties at all, and I'm not sure how you think a collusion ring would work, or how the 2016 and 2020 US elections are relevant to Asset Voting. There would be no harm in voting for Kasich in the Republican primaries because he would have been able to assign his votes to Cruz, for example, if he had come third.