Voting method nerds focus a bunch on various statistics and game theory things and so on, searching for a way to weigh fairness.
Personally I don't care if it's fair, I just want it to favor socialists, especially at a local level.
Approval voting has a bias towards moderation that's fairly intuitive, which is that the least-unwanted candidate will tend to win. So if a bunch of libs get together and approve of a centrist up to a succdems that's still pretty right wing, but balk at the socialist candidate, they can bank on centrist candidates also getting support from some farther right people. And someone who might vote for the socialist in FPTP might fill in the succdems or centrist bubbles as well, because hey they're a lib and they may legitimately approve of them, but not prefer them.
There are a lot of variations on how ranked choice is tabulated, but the basic ones like irv or multi-seat irv-ish ones have a middle exclusion effect that I personally favor for our chances. Least-preferred candidates get eliminated, so the centrists will likely end up being middle-least-preferred, say in the top 3 but then eliminated, making it a fight between farther left/right candidates.
Obviously elections and choices and politics are more complex than this, but it's handy to think of approval as a pro-centrism mechanism and ranked choice as (usually) one where socialists have a bigger shot.
Voting method nerds focus a bunch on various statistics and game theory things and so on, searching for a way to weigh fairness.
Personally I don't care if it's fair, I just want it to favor socialists, especially at a local level.
Approval voting has a bias towards moderation that's fairly intuitive, which is that the least-unwanted candidate will tend to win. So if a bunch of libs get together and approve of a centrist up to a succdems that's still pretty right wing, but balk at the socialist candidate, they can bank on centrist candidates also getting support from some farther right people. And someone who might vote for the socialist in FPTP might fill in the succdems or centrist bubbles as well, because hey they're a lib and they may legitimately approve of them, but not prefer them.
There are a lot of variations on how ranked choice is tabulated, but the basic ones like irv or multi-seat irv-ish ones have a middle exclusion effect that I personally favor for our chances. Least-preferred candidates get eliminated, so the centrists will likely end up being middle-least-preferred, say in the top 3 but then eliminated, making it a fight between farther left/right candidates.
Obviously elections and choices and politics are more complex than this, but it's handy to think of approval as a pro-centrism mechanism and ranked choice as (usually) one where socialists have a bigger shot.