Why RCV beats approval voting

Electoral reform is hot these days. Ranked-choice voting is getting most of the attention. But approval voting advocates are generating some buzz, too.

So what's the difference between the two, and which deserves your vote? The answer is easy: ranked-choice voting.

Both improve on our existing system of first-past-the-post plurality elections. But ranked-choice voting, or RCV, is superior for simple reasons: It makes more realistic assumptions about how voters and candidates behave. It assumes voters have meaningful preferences among their candidates, and that campaigns are strategic.

And though approval voting can seem simple at first, it actually requires voters to make more complex strategic calculations that are highly contingent on small variations in polling. Or, absent polling, voters must struggle to guess the strategic consequences of their votes amid candidates' and campaigns' propaganda.