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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I think the worst thing about U.S. national elections is that the winner of the electoral vote might not be the winner of the popular vote. Whether or not that is right is beside the point but anything complicated about the results that make them hard to understand will subtract legitimacy. I’d go so far to say that the system will not survive if we got several elections where one particular party consistently loses one vote but wins other.

The last thing we need, seen through that lens, is a complex system where people don’t understand the results or how exactly their vote will affect those results.

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> The last thing we need, seen through that lens, is a complex system where people don’t understand the results or how exactly their vote will affect those results.

And this is one of the best features of approval voting compared to any form of ranked choice!

"The winner is preferred to each other candidate, by the majority of voters" seems pretty straightforward to me. The problem with Approval is that we're right back at the Faustian bargain of needing to fully support the lesser evil at the expense of your preferred option. And the only thing Range adds is allowing you to moderate the amount of that bargain.

> "The winner is preferred to each other candidate, by the majority of voters" seems pretty straightforward to me.

It is, but 1) the public needs to be sufficiently convinced that all of the bookkeeping reliably determines which candidate that applies to in the face of possible error or malfeasance, and 2) sometimes there is no such candidate (cycles are possible) and what happens then can be complicated.

(And sure, ties are possible in ~any system, but if we treat cycles as ties we've made ties much more likely.)

If you have a Condorcet winner, sure. In fact, approval voting with "honest" ballots always yields the Condorcet winner if one is expressed†.

Where you get into trouble is that not all elections have a Condorcet winner. In particular:

> The problem with Approval is that we're right back at the Faustian bargain of needing to fully support the lesser evil at the expense of your preferred option.

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