Excessive political polarisation, especially party polarisation in the US, makes it harder to reach consensus or a fair compromise, and undermines trust in public institutions. Efforts to avoid harmful long-term dynamics, and to strengthen democratic governance, are therefore of interest to effective altruists.

One concrete lever is electoral reform. By changing to a better voting system, we could (so the argument goes) elect officials that better represent the electorate, resulting in a more functional political process.

Within effective altruism, approval voting is the most prominent proposal for reform (see e.g. this post). The Center for Election Science, which advocates approval voting, appears to be the only electoral reform organisation with significant ties to the EA community - e.g. in the form of a grant from OpenPhil.

In this post, I will question the focus on approval voting, and argue that it might be better to support other proposed voting systems that have a track record in competitive elections. I’ll also offer some thoughts on how promising electoral reform is.

Which voting system should we advocate for?

There are many possible methods and many different criteria to evaluate a voting method, some of which are provably incompatible. So, like other methods, approval voting satisfies some criteria and fails others. (See here for an overview of single-winner voting methods and satisfied/failed criteria.) Given that no perfect method exists, we should arguably look for a method which works well in practice and has good chances of being adopted.

Would approval voting work well in competitive elections? I think there are good reasons to be sceptical:

Approval voting is vulnerable to tactical voting. It fails the later-no-harm criterion: approving a second candidate can hurt your favourite. The average voter probably isn’t that strategic, but in high-stakes elections, savvy campaign leaders would surely attempt to get their supporters to vote tactically. The winner, then, may not be the candidate with the most support, but the one that’s best at manipulating the system. (See here for more details on this.)
Approval voting radically re-interprets the common-sense notion of "having a majority", leading to results that may be considered counterintuitive. This is reflected in the voting method criteria that approval voting fa

...

Electoral Reform