You would probably prefer STAR Voting, or a Condorcet variant of RCV, like Ranked Robin or Total Vote Runoff.

They have the more expressive ballots of Hare RCV without carrying over the flaws of FPTP.

Down voting and abstaining have been studied (and used), too:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_approval_voting
• https://electowiki.org/wiki/Explicit_approval_voting

You probably mean https://www.rcv123.org/? But that uses Hare's method, which is pretty flawed and won't always pick the candidate preferred by the voters.

Better to use https://star.vote/ (score ballots) or https://civs1.civs.us/civs_create.html (ranked ballots).

Approval Voting (AKA Freedom Voting)

haha that might be the dumbest rebrand I've ever heard. Hope it succeeds, though!

You just advertised a system that doesn’t count dissenting votes, therefore making it impossible to find the real acceptance of some choice.

Likewise, RCV doesn't count all of the voter's rankings, making it impossible to find the true preferred candidate from the published election results.

Hopefully this fails and the STAR Voting campaign succeeds. Very frustrating that the legislature shoved this onto the ballot without vetting it, while STAR has to spend enormous amounts of time and money to go through the normal ballot initiative process.

and the Condorcet method can completely fail to select a winner.

That one's not a flaw. All elections can suffer from ties. Pure Condorcet just makes it obvious when there's a tie (and this is very rare). There are a bunch of Condorcet completion methods for resolving the tie.

No, FairVote is not a reliable source. They knowingly use falsehoods to push Hare's method under the name "RCV", and to attack every other voting method and reform organization. Compare with other points of view:

• https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/
• https://www.equal.vote/star_vs_rcv
• https://www.starvoting.org/rcv_v_star

Unlike Hare RCV, Condorcet variants of RCV are good, but no organization is advocating them in the US, and FairVote actively works against them.

My suggestion here is counting all rankings, not having a winner determined by the sums of first choices, which would introduce some complexity and possible elimination of ballots

Some ranked ballot systems that count all rankings:

• https://www.equal.vote/ranked_robin
• https://electionlawblog.org/?p=132792 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanson's_method#Baldwin_method
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method

Ranked choice would absolutely still help. The two party state is utterly awful.

Depends which form of ranked choice. The naïvely-designed ones like Supplementary Vote, Contingent Vote, Instant-Runoff Voting, Top Four, Final Five, etc. don't fix the two-party system at all, since they only count first-choice rankings in each round, just like our current system. Unfortunately those are the only ones being advocated in the US. We need Condorcet-compliant systems if we actually want to fix the spoiler effect and end the two-party system. Total Vote Runoff/Baldwin, Ranked Robin, Schulze, etc.

As an aside, ranked voting isn’t what I’d consider ideal for the general election, either. It’s still heavily disproportionate. Proportional voting is far superior for ensuring representation.

Yes!

Any form of single winner ballot (ranked choice or FPTP) is gonna favour the centrist, even though that means 50% of the population don’t get their ideal representation.

Actually, both FPTP and RCV suffer from the "center-squeeze effect", so centrist candidates are at a disadvantage and they favor more polarizing candidates.

Unfortunately the form of RCV used everywhere in the US is Hare's method, which eliminates candidates based only on voters' first-choice rankings, which largely just perpetuates all the same problems as FPTP. There are many other better reforms. One of those should become the norm instead.

Have you tried https://star.vote? It's a better voting system https://www.equal.vote/star_vs_rcv

Ranked Choice Voting doesn't make third parties viable, either. It uses the same counting method as our current system (tally up people's first-choice preferences) and therefore suffers from all the same problems, like vote-splitting, spoiler effect, and center-squeeze effect. You can't fix the problems of FPTP by adding more rounds of FPTP. You need to allow voters to express opinions about all of the candidates and then actually count all of those opinions.

If you want third parties to be viable, you want real reforms like STAR Voting, Condorcet RCV, or Approval Voting.

Better ranked system (transferable vote instead of points)

https://civs1.civs.us/civs_create.html ? or https://star.vote for scored ballots

Because it doesn't allow you to express anything more than "approve" and "disapprove". I prefer it over Hare RCV, but the limited information expressable on the ballot makes it not that great overall.

Until ranked choice for president

That wouldn't change anything. RCV still produces a polarized two-party system.

As an Alaskan voter, ranked choice is the only reason we have a female, Native American, Democrat congressional representative instead of Sarah Palin filling Don Young’s deep red legacy.

Peltola would have won under FPTP, too; RCV didn't change the outcome. The real issue is that there were two Republicans on the same ballot vs one Democrat, splitting the vote with each other.

RCV is equitable and works, but not in the way progressives hope. It allows for the most centrist candidate to be chosen that appeals to the most possible people.

No, it suffers from the center-squeeze effect and is biased against the candidates that appeal to the most possible people. In Alaska's special election, for instance, Begich was preferred over both other candidates by a majority of voters, but RCV incorrectly eliminated him first. This flaw gave an unfair advantage to progressives in that election, which you may like, but it could just as easily give an unfair advantage to conservatives in a future election, which you wouldn't. (If there are two Democrats and one Republicans the ballot, for instance.)

In my opinion, for single-winner elections, we need better voting systems that do always elect the candidate who appeals to the most possible people, which will allow third parties and independents to become viable, which will open people's minds beyond the two-party false dichotomy.

A two party system just becomes a battle of political extremes. And like it or not, being progressive is far left for a reason, especially in America. And I consider myself fairly progressive leaning.

Yes, and RCV perpetuates that polarization because of the center-squeeze effect.