Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

...The issue with selecting the "best" voting system is not selecting the one which results in the best reflection of people's desires, but one that achieves the best balance between that aim and people having confidence in the voting system. If a voting system is sufficiently hard to understand then people will not have confidence in it and will keep assuming that the result is flawed.

You want a voting method that people can understand, right? So here I describe two methods.

A) You give each candidate a score on a 0-10 scale, and the candidate with the highest average wins.

B) You rate each candidate in order of preference. We check to see whether any candidate got a majority of first-place votes. If not, then we find the candidate who got the least first place votes, and remove him from all the ballots, and check again for a majority winner. If we get down to only one candidate, he is elected, even if he doesn't have a majority (this can happen if you let people leave some candidates off their ballots).

Hmmm...call me crazy, but IRV sounds a heck of a lot more complicated. Maybe that's why you don't see it used to rate products/books/faces/etc. online, but you DO see range voting used all over the place.

But say that's still not simple enough. Say you're a person who thinks both IRV and Range Voting are too complicated. Behold, Approval Voting, a simplified form of Range Voting that is exactly like plurality, except that you can vote for as many candidates as you want. Even that simplified method bests plurality, IRV, Condorcet, and Borda, coming second only to Range. And it's just a tiny bit more involved than plurality. So why not just switch to Approval voting, and get 90% of the quality improvement of Range Voting, and way more simplicity than IRV or Range voting?