Still, I'm not averse to trying. Either it will help, or tactical voting will leave us more or less where we are now. If nothing else it's an opportunity to give the current deadlock a shove.
"They can only approve of one" is FPTP, the existing system. Everybody knows that sucks. The whole point of approval or score voting is to avoid that.
Right now if you favor candidate C but they have 5% of the vote and candidate A and B each have 45%, your preferred candidate has no chance and your vote can only change something in determining whether the winner is A or B, so you avoid voting for your preferred candidate.
With approval voting you vote for them and one of the major parties. Then people notice that third party candidates are immediately getting 30-40% of the vote because the people afraid of wasting their vote no longer have to refrain from voting for their preferred candidate. In some districts they even win. Which dissolves the two party system because people have to take third party candidate seriously and starting a new party has a real chance at succeeding rather than being an exercise in futility.
But it's not clear they will feel the message is sent if their candidate loses, and they are stuck with least favorite choice because they didn't select an alternative.
with approval voting they'd obviously vote for green too.
some of the people who normally vote green under the current system might _still_ only vote green with approval voting, but very few would do it unless green actually had a chance to win.
Huh, where is that duress coming from?
> (Or they can approve of only one, and almost certainly lose if it's not one of the two most popular parties.)
Huh, why can they approve of only one? The whole point is that you can approve more than one.
Approval only seems to be able to break this gridlock if there is a "hidden" commonground between the two parties which can be revealed by the extra approval votes.
With a cardinal voting system, someone can run on a ticket which is similar to one of the major parties and should get approximately the same level of approval as that party's candidate. Which is to say, they can potentially win. Then more third party and independent candidates run, giving people more options.
It's not just about what voters do, it changes what candidates do.
Those options exist, and it's a multi way election. Primaries receive far less attention but they are where the real work of democracy is done.
I believe people are hoping they can vote for a radical candidate and a mainstream candidate, on the off chance people will love the radical candidate if they just get on the general ballot. I'm not convinced that will ever happen, and such people will be not just disappointed, but continue to be convinced the system is rigged against them.
No, you still have that problem of splitting the vote in the primaries.
Remember how Donald Trump used to be the most hated Republican candidates within the Republicans in around 2015 / 2016? As in the one that the most people actively disliked in polls; but he was different enough from the other candidates that he didn't suffer from the internal vote splitting that they did.
The primaries still use first-past-the-post in the US, don't they?
Yes, exactly, the indirect impact on candidate and voter tactics are what's important!
You lose the ability to know your local candidate, but how many people really do these days? It's what we set up in Iraq, but we don't do it ourselves.
It doesn't solve the problem that there is still exactly one chief executive. You can try making that a committee but that has other downsides.
But now you don't have a cardinal voting system and that's even worse than single member districts.
> It doesn't solve the problem that there is still exactly one chief executive. You can try making that a committee but that has other downsides.
Committees are dealing with it the wrong way. The right way to deal with it is to take away all of the executive's power. Constrain the national government from doing hardly anything and instead pass local laws to do whatever you want to do.
Then create elected positions responsible for different portions of the government. Directly elect the Attorney General and the heads of the major government departments. Let the President be like the Queen of England -- a figurehead with minimal responsibilities.
In Germany, you cast two different votes. The first vote elects your local representatives via a first-past-the-post system; they all go to parliament. Then you fill up parliament with more people to make the proportions match those of the second votes cast all over the country. (There's lots of special cases and rules involved. Eg to handle the case when a party gets lots of first votes, but no second votes.)