I don't really get the love that approval voting gets.
Approval voting requires the voter to decide whether or not to approve the lesser of two evils. It seems to me that this isn't a simple question it depends on the odds of different outcomes, level of preference between two evils, etc. To me that seems like it would make voting harder for most people, and politicians would absolutely be trying to mislead people about the appropriate strategies for who to approve and not approve.
I thought most people vote for who they like, or at least don't know they dislike, or just for those in their party. If that assumption is true, then approval voting wouldn't be nearly as challenging as you're making it the case to be.
Sure, approval voting is easy if you don't care about making effective use of your vote.
If you want to make effective use of your vote, you've got to make calls about supporting you people you dislike, but don't dislike as much as the other guy.
The important feature that approval voting has, and plurality lacks, is that approving your favorite candidate is never against your own interests. What you do with your second favorite is a matter of strategic voting, but thatβs what you were doing in FPTP anyway.
Pick-one, winner-take-all is pretty bad. Approval voting might be slightly better in some ways, but I'm not sure its better enough to make up for being just a little bit more strategically complicated.
I think on balance Approval Voting would be an improvement, by removing the spoiler effect and allowing new parties to emerge (and old parties to split), but you're right that burdening voters with difficult strategic questions is not a decision that should be taken lightly.
Of course, FPTP has its own strategic problems, leading to people having choose whether to vote against their actual preference, but this is at least a familiar problem for people that have experienced this type of election before. I suppose that voters who are confused by Approval Voting could continue to treat their ballot as if it were a FPTP ballot, but this does feel like it is giving more voting power to people who are more intelligent (which some people here might undemocratically see as a positive) or more devious (which people might not see themselves as).
For me, though, the biggest issue with Approval Voting is that it makes the counting process harder, which risks entrenching the need for untrustworthy electronic voting machines. Approval Voting does at least satisfy the Summability criterion, but, if counting by hand, the ballots ideally need to be divided into 2^N separate piles (for N candidates), or there needs to be N separate running tallies of votes, as opposed to under FPTP where there only needs to be N piles, and the piles could even be weighed to count them.
I don't believe that it is an unreasonable requirement that an electoral reform proposal allows easy hand counting of ballots, as MMP can be just as easy to count as FPTP. (If a separate ballot paper is used to express party preference in addition to candidate preference, that effectively means 2N piles, but the Zweitmandat system allows the party preference to be inferred without needing the second ballot paper).
Approval voting requires the voter to decide whether or not to approve the lesser of two evils. It seems to me that this isn't a simple question it depends on the odds of different outcomes, level of preference between two evils, etc. To me that seems like it would make voting harder for most people, and politicians would absolutely be trying to mislead people about the appropriate strategies for who to approve and not approve.