The case for approval voting

Citizens in many US states and cities in recent years have pushed for various reforms of voting methods. This raises the important question of which reform will best meet both normative and practical goals of representative democracy. While also evaluating criticisms of it, we make the case in this article that approval voting is the simplest actionable response. More specifically, we argue that approval voting offers distinct advantages, not only relative to the status quo of plurality voting, but also relative to alternative reforms. By giving voters the ability to support multiple candidates equally, approval voting grants true agency to the electorate to select strong winners among a candidate pool that is more competitive, diverse, and responsive to what voters want. As a low-cost yet high-impact electoral reform, the implementation of approval voting can create meaningful and lasting improvements in the quality of representation and policies.