Approval voting

• More expressive
• Removes vote splitting almost entirely, virtually eliminating spoilers
• You can never get a worse result by voting for your favorite
• Significantly fewer spoiled ballots
• Ballots look the same, except the rules indicate that you may vote for any number of candidates
• Results are still easy to understand: a simple list of the candidates along with how many votes they received
• Tends to elect candidates who would beat all rivals head-to-head
• Tends to elect more consensus winners
• Alternate candidates get a more accurate measure of support
  

...
Our extensive analysis over the years overwhelmingly supports the view that Approval Voting is a much simpler and more democratic system than IRV (also referred to as ranked-choice voting, or RCV). The results of approval voting elections are also much easier to understand than the numerous rounds of vote transfers that IRV utilizes. In an approval voting election, you would only see approval percentages and total votes for each candidate — much simpler than IRV.^[6]

Ultimately, Proposition D empowers St. Louis voters with more choices and ensures that the next mayor has to win the support of the majority of voters.^[6]

There are uses of approval voting that can make sense -- like when a group of people deciding on what movie to watch. While mathematicians can like this system and its alleged likelihood of electing a consensus winner, my colleagues and I are highly skeptical of its use in candidate elections. Two factors stand out:

• Viability and the issue of majority rule: If voters truly are free with their approvals in an approval voting election, it’s quite possible two or more candidates could earn more than half the vote. Indeed, it’s possible that a candidate whom well over half of voters see as a top choice could lose to someone who nobody sees as their top choice. Approval voting advocates defend such outcomes as fair, but it remains to be seen what voters would say.

• Workability in the real world: In approval voting elections, you can’t indicate support for more than one candidate without support for a lesser choice potentially causing the defeat of your first choice. This transparent dilemma for voters trying to cast a smart vote has immediate consequences. Because most voters as a result of this problem will refrain from approving of more than one candidate, the system in practice ends up looking far more like a plurality voting election system than a majority system.^[6]

Proposition D disenfranchises voters, because ballots that do not include the two ultimate finalists are cast aside to manufacture a faux majority for the winner. Under Proposition D, you never really know who will be running against whom in the final vote count with ranked choice. It is all a numbers gimmick.^[6]