Approval Voting

I learned about approval voting from a Nobel Prize winner on a panel about the media and democracy at Salem State College. He presented it as a solution to several problems with our single-vote (plurality) system. First off, plurality systems have a bias toward polarized candidates. (Any evidence of that? ;-) Approval voting is much more likely to elect better consensus candidates. Secondly, approval voting allows fully integrated participation of third parties without penalty to the two major parties. Thirdly, it is less susceptible to vote strategizing - the best vote is a sincere vote. And, finally, it would be a very small change to implement for most of America, including the fact that if someone continued to vote as if it were a single-vote system, that is still a valid, sincere vote.

I think approval voting is a great answer to these problems, and that everyone should contact their politicians and push for approval voting in all levels of government.

Wikipedia has a great article on approval voting.