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/
It’s certainly still better than the US’s current first-past-the-post system, but it has a critical flaw where a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which could be abused by people trying to “game” the voting system. In reality, something like approval or score voting would be more representative of voter’s desires.
See Nicky Case’s excellent write-up on how that can happen: https://ncase.me/ballot/
That’s interesting, I hadn’t heard that before, though the one that has that flaw you mentioned looks to be instant runoff voting, which is not quite what I was suggesting (what I was thinking of looks to be called “borda count” here, though the write up has a criticism of that as well)
EDIT: though upon giving this a half hour or so to contemplate, I think I’d still favor that method (borda) best, out of everything mentioned in that write up. If I’m understanding their criticism of it correctly, it seems that in a case where you have a candidate who is the preferred choice for a majority of voters, and another candidate who is the preferred choice for a sizable minority of voters, and a third candidate who is almost nobody’s preferred choice, but is somewhere in between them, it’s sometimes possible for that third candidate to win even though the first candidate seems like they ought to, being the top choice for a bit more than half the voters. That situation feels like it ought to help dampen against polarization and cults of personality, because a candidate that is loved by a slim majority, but hated by everyone else, won’t do as well as a candidate that manages to be everyone’s second choice, that almost everyone can at least begrudgingly accept. It’s not perfect obviously, I can imagine that it would tend to promote boring moderates that would make major changes and progress slow, which would frustrate me personally, not being a moderate myself- but I think it would result in a system that is reasonably stable and which should still generally trend towards the will of the majority, which sounds a lot better than what the US currently has. The non-ranked options presented sound intriguing, but I do think that people would just turn them into first past the post again by only marking their favorite as acceptable or giving their favorite the highest score and everyone else the lowest, because in addition to that being “strategic”, it’s also easier, and the cynic in me says that people are often lazy about these things.