alt Hacker NewsApproval, not ranked-choice.
Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party dominance.
Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit. Not only does it eliminate the spoiler problem, it is easy to see why it does so: your ability to vote for any candidate is independent of your ability to vote for any other.
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> Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit.
Not so dead simple to vote, though. If you're a sincere voter and you prefer Alice to Bob and Bob to Charlie, do you approve of Alice, or both Alice and Bob?
That choice has to be either strategic or very noisy.
There seems to be some unavoidable complexity to voting methods: letting the voter deal with the complexity leads to a method with a very simple algorithm but that's tricky to use. Letting the method itself deal with it leads to more complex algorithms, but makes it easier to vote.
That said, the alternative vote is a bad ranked voting method; with that I do agree. Just beware of the complexity hidden in the system, whether that's Approval or Ranked Pairs.
I've heard the arguments for approval voting, and I'm sure it's all the things you mention and more, but people don't get it. I don't get it. I don't want to vote for both Hillary and Bernie. I want to vote for Bernie, and then only if Bernie can't win, would I let my vote go to Hillary. You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
I know, it sucks. Politics is terrible. But we have some momentum behind RC/IRV so we should use it and stop the single-vote FPTP system that's plagued us for centuries. Anything is better than that. So let's join forces and get behind whatever has momentum even if it's not technically the best.