Almost everywhere, plurality voting is the system used for elections. It is a simple system which can work quite well, so long as there are more than two candidates; in other words, not usually. In concept, plurality elections will elect the candidate who is the top choice of the largest number of voters. But when there are more than two candidates, is that even a sensible objective? And we might also question whether plurality elections actually even realize that objective.
For now, let us assume it is accurate to claim that the votes are cast for voters' favorite candidates. Even when there are only two candidates, our experience with elections is that usually there are nearly as many voters who vote for another candidate as there are who voted for the winner; and, as is so often the case, there are more than two candidates, the number of disappointed voters can even be in the majority. Can we not hope to do better than this?
To a considerable extent, these disappointing outcomes are due to polarization. Polarization fosters and enforces a two-party duopoly and limits, to no more than two, the number of viable candidates (viable candidates are the ones who have a realistic chance of winning election).
A duopoly motivates most voters to limit their voting, not to mention their attention, to focus only on the two duopoly candidates. Even when voters happen to prefer another candidate, typically they choose not to waste their only vote on that candidate; they know that candidate to have no realistic chance of winning election. A consequence of this behavior is that ballots fail to reliably show which candidate is a voter's favorite. So, our assumption is false and there really is no way to know whether an election is achieving its objective.
Well aware of how dysfunctional plurality elections can be, voters cast strategic votes constrained by predictions of electability and not simply on the basis of preference. Strategic voting makes it difficult to interpret what election results mean and perhaps for that reason, strategic voting is often regarded as something to be avoided. And it is true that in extreme cases, strategic voting could serve a malicious intent such as an attack on election integrity. But that is not the usual situation. Most often it is good strategic voting, an entirely honorable effort to forestall a flawed election. Voters generally resent having to do this, but the voters are not to blame for the problem; it is the dysfunctional plurality voting system that is the problem.
It is widely understood that we have a duopoly because we continue to use plurality voting; this claim even has a name, Duverger's Law. It really seems more of an observation than a law, but that aside, Duverger's Law should not be interpreted as suggesting that just any other voting system would let us avoid the duopoly. We might coin the name, Duverger's pitfall, for this unjustified assumption. There is little reason to think that just another voting system such as ranked choice voting or approval voting would result in additional viable candidates; doing that seems to require a very special sort of voting system.
So, what about a balanced system? Balanced voting systems offer alternatives that mitigate some problems with plurality voting. They measure voter opposition to candidates and treat opposition votes as equally significant as support votes. The inclusion of an opposition vote enables voters to just as easily penalize individual candidates as it is for them to reward them. Fear of such punishing votes should cause candidates to hesitate before offending even their non-supporters. This improvement alone makes suggests that balance provides at least a step in the right direction.
Adopting a balanced voting system might encourage more candidates to compete in elections. And there is reason to hope with more candidates there will be a few who would seem acceptable to (though perhaps not the very first choice of) a distinct majority of voters. Unfortunately though, it is no more clear than with ranked choice or approval voting, how merely adopting a balanced voting system would make it possible for even such a popular third party candidates to ever win election.
When accustomed to a duopoly, most voters do not even consider voting for other than one of the two duopoly candidates. So merely introducing additional candidates to an election will not particularly improve the likelihood that one of them will get elected; indeed, multiple third-party candidates are more apt to compete with each other than with the duopoly. Something further is needed for third parties to credibly compete with the duopoly.
Evaluative voting systems offer yet other alternatives to plurality voting. Using these systems, voters evaluate each candidate in isolation, not in comparison to one another. An example of this is approval voting; an approval voter can support any number of candidates while abstaining (withholding support) for the others. The approval voter is encouraged to make decisions for one candidate at a time in isolation, with never a need to compare one candidate with another. The voter simply checkmarks which candidates the voter believes would be a satisfactory choice. Approval voting makes voting pretty easy. Sadly though, approval voting also lacks what is needed to cure a duopoly.
Balanced approval voting (BAV) is a quite special voting system because it is both balanced and evaluative. Because BAV is evaluative, voters face no perplexing decision about whether to vote for one candidate or against another. A BAV voter is entirely free to do both. Using BAV, a voter can specify opposition to several candidates, support to several others while abstaining with respect to the remaining candidates. Given a duopoly, the voter who prefers the Democrat will almost certainly vote for the Democrat and against the Republican.
But these are details; the most significant thing to know about BAV, is that that it promises to be a cure for duopoly. Such voting systems are a rare breed and BAV is just one of that rare breed, but it is unique in appearing to be the simplest of the balanced and evaluative systems.
By being balanced and evaluative, BAV is able to penalize polarization itself. Whenever there are two polarizing candidates, they find themselves pitted against one another in a way that reduces the vote tallies for both; Democrats vote for the Democratic candidate and against the Republican candidate; likewise, Republicans vote for the Republican and against the Democrat; both would have a net vote of zero. Usually, of course, the numbers would be only approximately equal, but still, tallying this way can strip the duopoly of its unbreachable dominance; perhaps not always but often. With the duopoly candidates stripped of this advantage, other candidates will be able to achieve viability and duopoly can be relegated to the dustbin of history.
All parties will feel forced to moderate their positions and learn to compete against a greater number of viable opponents. While the Republican and Democratic parties can still survive, compete and even win elections at times, they would never regain the kind dominance the two have so long shared.
BAV has important virtues beyond merely encouraging additional viable candidates. BAV is easy to understand, simple to administer and it encourages voter participation by making voting particularly easy. This is because BAV reduces the need for voters to make particularly difficult choices even while it provides voters with improved flexibility in specifying their preferences.
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