@CWOTUS I’m talking about the first-past-the-post single-vote system in races with more than one candidate and two de-facto “only viable” parties. This system has us always voting for the lesser evil from two money-drenched parties. So even if we have a good candidate, the (D) and the® candidate will have a ridiculous advantage. Moreover, it just doesn’t allow us to express our actual preferences, and there’s no practical reason (other than ignorance, inertia, lack of understanding, and difficulty of changing established voting systems) that it shouldn’t.
Say 70% of the people don’t actually approve of either the D or R candidate, and there’s an independent that 60% of people think seems pretty good. They have to choose D, R or I with the media and conventional conversations repeating that a vote for I (if they even mention that is a possibility) is a wasted vote, or even claiming that a vote for I is a vote for or against the D or the R. Well, if the voting system let you vote Approve or Disapprove (or no opinion) for each candidate, or to list the candidates in your order of preference (called Instant Run-Off voting), then the candidate people actually prefer might have a chance, and more independents could have a chance, instead of always voting for the D or R money-backed candidates. You would not be helping one party candidate over another backwards of your D-vs.-R preference, if you could vote for whomever you really liked first, and put your D or R preference just somewhere before the D or R you didn’t prefer.
As it is, we’re practically always going to have a tyrrany of the D and R candidates. If we had instant run-off or another such system, we wouldn’t need to have primaries eliminate secondary candidates, because they could all be listed and we could vote the order in which we actually prefer them, and/or vote actually against the candidates we find unacceptable.
For example, I’d also like to be able to say DISAPPROVE to some candidates, and I think there should be a threshold (50%? 40%) above which if that percentage or more of the voters vote DISAPPROVE for that candidate, they can’t win. I.e., in the 2016 election, both Clinton and Trump might have been ineligible due to negative approval ratings – if they’d both got as many people voting DISAPPROVE as they polled disapproving them in November, neither would have been allowed to be president. That makes a whole lot of sense to me for a supposed democracy. If the vote is allowed to measure how many people actually think each candidate should be president, as opposed to simply the lesser evil race, then I’d hope that would mean something.