Sounds like you'd like more expressiveness in a voting method, so score voting is what you want, not ranked voting. That also avoids this problem.
Approval Voting demonstrably works well, and has easy to understand results. The problem with RCV isn't just that it produces failures like in Alaska: https://ranked.vote/report/us/ak/2022/08/cd but also that the results can be so complex that people don't trust the results. There are many, many instances of elections where the candidate with the most first place votes lost. While you and I know that's the whole point of RCV, it erodes trust:
This piece is exactly as good as careful reasoning produces when you haven't read the empirical literature before publishing: confident, internally consistent, and wrong at the foundation.
Start with the most fundamental error, because everything else flows from it. You argue that approval voting works only under the assumption that voters' underlying preferences are binary—that someone who approves both Alice and Bob genuinely feels equal about them, and will remain indifferent in a two-way race. You call this unrealistic and conclude the system breaks down under strategic reoptimization.
Nobody in the approval voting research literature claims voters' preferences are binary. Nobody. The Bayesian regret simulations—the actual quantitative framework used to evaluate voting methods—assign voters continuous cardinal utility values, then model how those voters make decisions under each system. That's the whole point: test performance with realistically non-binary preferences and see what happens. What you've done is invent a claim that advocates never made, refute it, and declare victory. The research doesn't say "approval voting is good because preferences are binary." It says "approval voting produces better outcomes than IRV when you aggregate realistically non-binary preferences through each system's mechanism." That's an empirical claim about outcomes, verified by simulation, and your piece never touches it.
The right framework for comparing voting systems isn't criteria-satisfaction under idealized assumptions. It's: which system produces outcomes closest to what voters actually want, given realistic mixtures of honest and strategic behavior? That question has been answered rigorously by Warren Smith's Bayesian regret calculations at ScoreVoting.net and independently by Jameson Quinn's Voter Satisfaction Efficiency simulations. Both evaluate roughly fifty voting methods across tens of thousands of simulated elections with voters modeled at various honesty levels. The result is consistent: score voting wins, approval voting performs well above IRV, and IRV clusters near the bottom of reasonable single-winner methods—comparable to plain plurality in some configurations. In the 50% strategic / 50% honest voter model—the one critics predicted would be approval voting's worst case—approval voting still beats IRV with every single voter being honest. IRV's strategic profile is that bad. Writing a piece dismissing approval voting without addressing Bayesian regret is like arguing a drug doesn't work while declining to read the clinical trial results.
Now the expressiveness argument, which you imply and IRV advocates make explicitly: ranked ballots are more expressive than approval ballots, therefore ranked systems capture more voter information, therefore they produce better outcomes. This is wrong in a specific way worth naming. The expressiveness that matters isn't at the ballot level—it's at the tabulation level. A ballot can carry a lot of information that the algorithm promptly discards.
Consider a three-candidate race where 335 voters prefer hot then warm, 333 prefer cold then warm, and 332 prefer warm. Under IRV, warm is eliminated first for having the fewest first-choice votes. But 67% of voters prefer warm to hot, and 67% prefer warm to cold. Warm is the Condorcet winner by a landslide. The ranked ballots contained that information. IRV threw it away, because IRV only looks at your second choice after your first has been eliminated—and warm voters' second choices never mattered because warm was gone in round one. Under approval voting, most of those 335 and 333 voters approve warm as an acceptable second choice, and warm wins. The supposedly "less expressive" system produced the better outcome because its tabulation mechanism actually used the available information.
This isn't purely hypothetical. Alaska 2022 is the textbook example. Nick Begich was the Condorcet winner—he beat both Sarah Palin and Mary Peltola head-to-head. He was eliminated in round one for having the fewest first-choice votes. Peltola won despite a majority of Alaskans preferring Begich over her. Palin was the Condorcet loser—she lost every head-to-head matchup—yet her presence split the Republican vote and handed the election to the opposite party. That's the spoiler effect, the one IRV is specifically supposed to prevent. The election also exhibited monotonicity failure: had some Palin bullet voters instead supported Peltola, Peltola would have lost. Gaining votes caused the winner to become a loser. Burlington 2009 had the same structure—IRV eliminated the Condorcet winner, exhibited non-monotonicity, and Burlington repealed IRV 52-48. When the mayor tried to bring it back two years later, voters rejected that too, 58-42.
These failures aren't the norm numerically—out of 463 documented US RCV elections, only 11 exhibited serious pathologies like Condorcet failure or monotonicity failure, and the Condorcet winner prevailed in the vast majority. But filter to elections with genuinely competitive third candidates—the exact scenario IRV is supposed to handle better than plurality—and the failure rate climbs to 3.4%. More importantly, the theoretical possibility of these failures shapes behavior even when they don't trigger. After Alaska 2022, two viable candidates dropped out of the 2024 rematch specifically to avoid being spoilers. That's the system working exactly as critics predict: rational actors defang the multi-candidate environment that IRV was supposed to enable. A study of hundreds of RCV elections found that candidate counts spiked after adoption and then receded within just a few elections, as parties learned the incentive structure. The pathology doesn't have to occur frequently to be corrosive—it just has to be possible, and known to be possible by the people deciding whether to run.
The bullet voting argument runs empirically backwards. The claim—made loudest by FairVote—is that strategic approval voters will simply approve only their top candidate, collapsing the system into plurality. Theoretically wrong: the optimal approval strategy is to approve every candidate you prefer over the expected value of the winner, which in any competitive race typically means several candidates. Bullet voting sacrifices voting power; NES polling data bears this out—about 90% of 2000 voters who preferred Nader voted for someone else, demonstrating that most voters optimize for electoral impact rather than pure preference expression. Empirically wrong: in the 2002 French presidential approval study, only 11.1% of ballots were bullet-style with total approvals at 315%. In the comparable 2007 San Francisco IRV mayoral election, 53% of ballots were bullet-style with total rankings below 187%. IRV produced nearly five times more bullet voting than approval voting. St. Louis's 2025 approval mayoral race showed 32.8% of voters approving multiple candidates, with 84% of minor-candidate supporters expressing additional preferences—exactly the voters whose voices would have been lost under plurality.
Your footnote deserves attention because it's where your actual prescription lives: use ranked ballots, find the Condorcet winner if one exists, fall back to eliminating last-place finishers otherwise. Condorcet+IRV sounds reasonable. It appears in the Bayesian regret simulations and performs worse than plain approval voting under realistic mixed-voter conditions. More ballot information doesn't guarantee better outcomes when strategic voters exploit that information asymmetrically. Approval and score voting's robustness to strategy comes precisely from the simplicity of the ballot structure limiting the surface area for gaming.
On Kenneth Arrow: dismissing his appreciation for score and approval voting as geriatric politeness is an ad hominem that is also factually incorrect. Arrow said clearly and on the record that his impossibility theorem applies to ranked-order social welfare functions, and that score-based systems occupy a different mathematical space where his theorem's assumptions don't apply in the same way. He wasn't being gracious. He was being precise—his professional specialty for seventy years. His view can be disputed, but "he was just being nice to a persistent young man" is not how you dispute it.
The conclusion that ranked choice remains the best option is unsupported by the evidence you examined and directly contradicted by the evidence you didn't. The Bayesian regret simulations are decisive on their own. The real-world record adds insult to injury: Burlington repealed IRV, Alaska nearly repealed it, six state ballot measures to expand it all failed in 2024, 19 states have banned it outright, and its flagship elections keep producing the exact pathologies it was supposed to eliminate. Approval voting's record includes Fargo and St. Louis, where voters understood it immediately, used it as intended, and expressed preferences that plurality would have buried. The simulations and the elections point in the same direction. The case isn't close.
But if you had any evidence to support your position, why not list it here at least for the benefit of others, if you think I'm somehow just not understanding something?
I just gave a debunking of what you formerly claimed is your trump card and now you're pretending you didn't say it and giving a long ramble arguing against a bunch of stuff I didn't say so clearly you're just being disingenuous. Ranked choice ballots don't have to be IRV and I know you know that already.
STV is used where you want proportionality. Say you’re electing a council and don’t want to divide it into single winner wards, how do you ensure that the majority doesn’t sweep the council? STV does this by transferring votes.
'gaming' is when a voter can get something closer to what they want by voting dishonestly. The classic problem for STV is that a voter whose top choice already has more than enough support to get in can avoid diluting their vote by not putting that candidate first. In winner take all elections that problem doesn't apply because there's no concept of lessening how much a vote counts when selecting later down the line candidates because there are no later down the line positions.
Single Transferable Vote is an algorithm for when there should be multiple winners instead of exactly one. Requiring more than one winner results in many more opportunities for gaming the system.
A voting system is the ballot format plus the tabulation algorithm—those are inseparable. If you took approval-style ballots and fed them into IRV's tabulation, you wouldn't get approval voting results. You'd get plurality results, because every candidate on every ballot would have exactly one "first choice" vote. The tabulation destroys the information.
Approval voting's power comes from its counting mechanism: every approved candidate gets a vote, the most-approved wins. That's a fundamentally different aggregation than IRV's sequential elimination. Calling approval voting a "subset" of RCV because its ballots are simpler is like calling chess a subset of checkers because the pieces move on the same board.
Approval voting is cardinal, not ordinal, so your vote for X cannot change the outcome between Y and Z. (Independence of irrelevant alternatives.) And unlike most ranked methods, it also cannot possibly hurt you to give the max support to your sincere favorite candidate. It satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion". THIS is key to the dramatically superior tactical resistance of approval voting. Whereas instant runoff voting
and virtually all ranked methods fail this. It's like my aunt who voted for Biden instead of Warren to stop Trump. She'd rank Biden 1st even tho Warren was here sincere favorite.
Ranked voting methods just aren't fit for the rough and tumble world of politics.
Approval voting is ranked choice voting where the voter is restricted to using two levels (including blank) instead of more than two. Is that correct? If so, what benefit is the restriction?
this is the wrong way to think about it. score voting (e.g. 0-5) is an improvement over ranked voting, because it satisfies the favorite betrayal criterion and makes more efficient use of the information on the ballot. approval voting effectively rounds every score to the min or max, so the error it adds mostly cancels out, and thus it still performs extremely well, while being insanely simple. it's just massively superior to IRV.
Something reasonable, see the footnote. Instant runoff does suck and should be improved on, but that should be done by switching to a better algorithm not by making the whole system fundamentally worse.
Sounds like you'd like more expressiveness in a voting method, so score voting is what you want, not ranked voting. That also avoids this problem.
Approval Voting demonstrably works well, and has easy to understand results. The problem with RCV isn't just that it produces failures like in Alaska: https://ranked.vote/report/us/ak/2022/08/cd but also that the results can be so complex that people don't trust the results. There are many, many instances of elections where the candidate with the most first place votes lost. While you and I know that's the whole point of RCV, it erodes trust:
https://ranked.vote/report/us/ca/alameda/2022/11/oakland-mayor
https://abc7news.com/post/sheng-thao-indictment-loren-taylor-mailers-oakland-mayoral-race/15811727/
Approval Voting working well:
https://felixsargent.com/democracy/2025/08/29/st-louis-approval-voting.html
No. Just no.
This piece is exactly as good as careful reasoning produces when you haven't read the empirical literature before publishing: confident, internally consistent, and wrong at the foundation.
Start with the most fundamental error, because everything else flows from it. You argue that approval voting works only under the assumption that voters' underlying preferences are binary—that someone who approves both Alice and Bob genuinely feels equal about them, and will remain indifferent in a two-way race. You call this unrealistic and conclude the system breaks down under strategic reoptimization.
Nobody in the approval voting research literature claims voters' preferences are binary. Nobody. The Bayesian regret simulations—the actual quantitative framework used to evaluate voting methods—assign voters continuous cardinal utility values, then model how those voters make decisions under each system. That's the whole point: test performance with realistically non-binary preferences and see what happens. What you've done is invent a claim that advocates never made, refute it, and declare victory. The research doesn't say "approval voting is good because preferences are binary." It says "approval voting produces better outcomes than IRV when you aggregate realistically non-binary preferences through each system's mechanism." That's an empirical claim about outcomes, verified by simulation, and your piece never touches it.
The right framework for comparing voting systems isn't criteria-satisfaction under idealized assumptions. It's: which system produces outcomes closest to what voters actually want, given realistic mixtures of honest and strategic behavior? That question has been answered rigorously by Warren Smith's Bayesian regret calculations at ScoreVoting.net and independently by Jameson Quinn's Voter Satisfaction Efficiency simulations. Both evaluate roughly fifty voting methods across tens of thousands of simulated elections with voters modeled at various honesty levels. The result is consistent: score voting wins, approval voting performs well above IRV, and IRV clusters near the bottom of reasonable single-winner methods—comparable to plain plurality in some configurations. In the 50% strategic / 50% honest voter model—the one critics predicted would be approval voting's worst case—approval voting still beats IRV with every single voter being honest. IRV's strategic profile is that bad. Writing a piece dismissing approval voting without addressing Bayesian regret is like arguing a drug doesn't work while declining to read the clinical trial results.
Now the expressiveness argument, which you imply and IRV advocates make explicitly: ranked ballots are more expressive than approval ballots, therefore ranked systems capture more voter information, therefore they produce better outcomes. This is wrong in a specific way worth naming. The expressiveness that matters isn't at the ballot level—it's at the tabulation level. A ballot can carry a lot of information that the algorithm promptly discards.
Consider a three-candidate race where 335 voters prefer hot then warm, 333 prefer cold then warm, and 332 prefer warm. Under IRV, warm is eliminated first for having the fewest first-choice votes. But 67% of voters prefer warm to hot, and 67% prefer warm to cold. Warm is the Condorcet winner by a landslide. The ranked ballots contained that information. IRV threw it away, because IRV only looks at your second choice after your first has been eliminated—and warm voters' second choices never mattered because warm was gone in round one. Under approval voting, most of those 335 and 333 voters approve warm as an acceptable second choice, and warm wins. The supposedly "less expressive" system produced the better outcome because its tabulation mechanism actually used the available information.
This isn't purely hypothetical. Alaska 2022 is the textbook example. Nick Begich was the Condorcet winner—he beat both Sarah Palin and Mary Peltola head-to-head. He was eliminated in round one for having the fewest first-choice votes. Peltola won despite a majority of Alaskans preferring Begich over her. Palin was the Condorcet loser—she lost every head-to-head matchup—yet her presence split the Republican vote and handed the election to the opposite party. That's the spoiler effect, the one IRV is specifically supposed to prevent. The election also exhibited monotonicity failure: had some Palin bullet voters instead supported Peltola, Peltola would have lost. Gaining votes caused the winner to become a loser. Burlington 2009 had the same structure—IRV eliminated the Condorcet winner, exhibited non-monotonicity, and Burlington repealed IRV 52-48. When the mayor tried to bring it back two years later, voters rejected that too, 58-42.
These failures aren't the norm numerically—out of 463 documented US RCV elections, only 11 exhibited serious pathologies like Condorcet failure or monotonicity failure, and the Condorcet winner prevailed in the vast majority. But filter to elections with genuinely competitive third candidates—the exact scenario IRV is supposed to handle better than plurality—and the failure rate climbs to 3.4%. More importantly, the theoretical possibility of these failures shapes behavior even when they don't trigger. After Alaska 2022, two viable candidates dropped out of the 2024 rematch specifically to avoid being spoilers. That's the system working exactly as critics predict: rational actors defang the multi-candidate environment that IRV was supposed to enable. A study of hundreds of RCV elections found that candidate counts spiked after adoption and then receded within just a few elections, as parties learned the incentive structure. The pathology doesn't have to occur frequently to be corrosive—it just has to be possible, and known to be possible by the people deciding whether to run.
The bullet voting argument runs empirically backwards. The claim—made loudest by FairVote—is that strategic approval voters will simply approve only their top candidate, collapsing the system into plurality. Theoretically wrong: the optimal approval strategy is to approve every candidate you prefer over the expected value of the winner, which in any competitive race typically means several candidates. Bullet voting sacrifices voting power; NES polling data bears this out—about 90% of 2000 voters who preferred Nader voted for someone else, demonstrating that most voters optimize for electoral impact rather than pure preference expression. Empirically wrong: in the 2002 French presidential approval study, only 11.1% of ballots were bullet-style with total approvals at 315%. In the comparable 2007 San Francisco IRV mayoral election, 53% of ballots were bullet-style with total rankings below 187%. IRV produced nearly five times more bullet voting than approval voting. St. Louis's 2025 approval mayoral race showed 32.8% of voters approving multiple candidates, with 84% of minor-candidate supporters expressing additional preferences—exactly the voters whose voices would have been lost under plurality.
Your footnote deserves attention because it's where your actual prescription lives: use ranked ballots, find the Condorcet winner if one exists, fall back to eliminating last-place finishers otherwise. Condorcet+IRV sounds reasonable. It appears in the Bayesian regret simulations and performs worse than plain approval voting under realistic mixed-voter conditions. More ballot information doesn't guarantee better outcomes when strategic voters exploit that information asymmetrically. Approval and score voting's robustness to strategy comes precisely from the simplicity of the ballot structure limiting the surface area for gaming.
On Kenneth Arrow: dismissing his appreciation for score and approval voting as geriatric politeness is an ad hominem that is also factually incorrect. Arrow said clearly and on the record that his impossibility theorem applies to ranked-order social welfare functions, and that score-based systems occupy a different mathematical space where his theorem's assumptions don't apply in the same way. He wasn't being gracious. He was being precise—his professional specialty for seventy years. His view can be disputed, but "he was just being nice to a persistent young man" is not how you dispute it.
The conclusion that ranked choice remains the best option is unsupported by the evidence you examined and directly contradicted by the evidence you didn't. The Bayesian regret simulations are decisive on their own. The real-world record adds insult to injury: Burlington repealed IRV, Alaska nearly repealed it, six state ballot measures to expand it all failed in 2024, 19 states have banned it outright, and its flagship elections keep producing the exact pathologies it was supposed to eliminate. Approval voting's record includes Fargo and St. Louis, where voters understood it immediately, used it as intended, and expressed preferences that plurality would have buried. The simulations and the elections point in the same direction. The case isn't close.
I’m not wasting any more time engaging with you
But if you had any evidence to support your position, why not list it here at least for the benefit of others, if you think I'm somehow just not understanding something?
I just gave a debunking of what you formerly claimed is your trump card and now you're pretending you didn't say it and giving a long ramble arguing against a bunch of stuff I didn't say so clearly you're just being disingenuous. Ranked choice ballots don't have to be IRV and I know you know that already.
What do you define as a gamed system?
STV is used where you want proportionality. Say you’re electing a council and don’t want to divide it into single winner wards, how do you ensure that the majority doesn’t sweep the council? STV does this by transferring votes.
'gaming' is when a voter can get something closer to what they want by voting dishonestly. The classic problem for STV is that a voter whose top choice already has more than enough support to get in can avoid diluting their vote by not putting that candidate first. In winner take all elections that problem doesn't apply because there's no concept of lessening how much a vote counts when selecting later down the line candidates because there are no later down the line positions.
that's orthogonal to gaming/strategy. that's just about proportionality.
Approval voting seems like just a restriction or subset of ranked choice voting.
Is Single Transferable Vote also just a subset of ranked choice voting?
Single Transferable Vote is an algorithm for when there should be multiple winners instead of exactly one. Requiring more than one winner results in many more opportunities for gaming the system.
A voting system is the ballot format plus the tabulation algorithm—those are inseparable. If you took approval-style ballots and fed them into IRV's tabulation, you wouldn't get approval voting results. You'd get plurality results, because every candidate on every ballot would have exactly one "first choice" vote. The tabulation destroys the information.
Approval voting's power comes from its counting mechanism: every approved candidate gets a vote, the most-approved wins. That's a fundamentally different aggregation than IRV's sequential elimination. Calling approval voting a "subset" of RCV because its ballots are simpler is like calling chess a subset of checkers because the pieces move on the same board.
Approval voting is cardinal, not ordinal, so your vote for X cannot change the outcome between Y and Z. (Independence of irrelevant alternatives.) And unlike most ranked methods, it also cannot possibly hurt you to give the max support to your sincere favorite candidate. It satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion". THIS is key to the dramatically superior tactical resistance of approval voting. Whereas instant runoff voting
and virtually all ranked methods fail this. It's like my aunt who voted for Biden instead of Warren to stop Trump. She'd rank Biden 1st even tho Warren was here sincere favorite.
Ranked voting methods just aren't fit for the rough and tumble world of politics.
Approval voting is ranked choice voting where the voter is restricted to using two levels (including blank) instead of more than two. Is that correct? If so, what benefit is the restriction?
There isn't any really
this is the wrong way to think about it. score voting (e.g. 0-5) is an improvement over ranked voting, because it satisfies the favorite betrayal criterion and makes more efficient use of the information on the ballot. approval voting effectively rounds every score to the min or max, so the error it adds mostly cancels out, and thus it still performs extremely well, while being insanely simple. it's just massively superior to IRV.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/approval-voting-vs-irv
When you say "ranked-choice voting", what tallying rule are you thinking about?
Something reasonable, see the footnote. Instant runoff does suck and should be improved on, but that should be done by switching to a better algorithm not by making the whole system fundamentally worse.
I meant the question for @Joseph.