Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”.

https://www.rangevoting.org/CompChart.html#votsysts

That site promotes range voting, and rather superficially dismisses approval voting: "Why Range Voting is Better than Approval Voting": https://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html

We've got MMP here in New Zealand, which is a fantastic improvement over what we had. However the list vote does give politicians some weird power.

Comment moderation is voting too.

We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.

And that's electoral votes. Counting actual people has the most voted candidate lose all the time.

Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two. If I don't check my third choice then I risk them losing to even worse options.

> We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.

And people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment.

> Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two.

Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting. Instead of scoring each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, it's score each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1. Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.

Both of them are still better than RCV.

> Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost”

As a non-US-American, it is hard to understand for me why this is so hard to explain: the amount of #1 votes is rather a measure for the number of "ultra-fans" that the candidate has.

I think it should be rather easy to find an example in US-American pop culture of some C-list celebrity who has a respectable base of very devoted ultra-fans, but is hated by basically everybody else.

This example should make the fallacy obvious to most people.