Instead of only voting for one candidate we should be able to upvote or downvote each candidate

Nix@merv.news to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 104 points –

It would be great to be able to vote for every candidate in an election instead of only once and you can decide to upvote, downvote, or not vote for any candidate. This way you never “throw away” your vote and extreme/hated candidates can be downvoted so if im not a fan of any candidate but one is particularly awful I can downvote that one and not vote any I don’t like while still making my voice heard that I definitely don’t want this specific candidate

Edit: Combined Approval Voting is what I want and its used by to elect the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee and the Secretary General of the United Nations

Edit 2: You can learn about and try different voting methods in this amazing project https://ncase.me/ballot/

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Have you ever heard of Ranked Choice, or Instant Runoff Voting?

I was all-in for ranked choice voting (and even started working on an app for it) until I learned that a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which is extremely counterintuitive, and a flaw that I don't think any voting system should have.

Nicky Case wrote a fantastic explanation about how that can happen, plus exploring many other voting methods: https://ncase.me/ballot/

I still think RCV (and really anything else) would be better than the US's first-past-the-post system, but I'd definitely prefer some type of approval, score, or STAR voting over it.

Yes. Often there are unintended results. I think another issue is that many people would have difficulty understanding the math behind it. It is not complex but it doesn't end up with concise results sometimes and distrust in the system can certainly jilt some people as we have witnessed enough.

That was a fantastic explanation, thanks for that

I have. What i want is an improved verison of Approval Voting