The Center for Election Science

• Plurality voting, where electors vote for a single candidate from a list and the one with the most votes wins, is by far the most common voting system worldwide. Yet it is widely agreed by social choice theorists to be one of the worst voting systems, leading to random outcomes and often favoring extreme candidates. The Center for Election Science (CES) campaigns to adopt approval voting in the US, where voters can pick every candidate they "approve" of and the one with most approval wins.
• I'm not sure whether approval voting is better than alternatives like ranked choice voting: my sense is approval voting has nicer theoretical properties and is backed by lab experiments. However, ranked choice voting has been battle-tested in more political situations. Both of them are, however, much better than plurality voting.
• If implemented, approval voting could result in politicians being elected that more reliably reflect popular opinion and, in particular, favor candidates that appeal to a broad base. This seems likely to improve political stability and institutional decision-making, which seems robustly positive for the long-term. However, it's not without its pitfalls. For example, perhaps an extreme candidate winning occasionally helps "reset" government and keep it dynamic. Approval voting is likely to avoid those extreme candidates who don’t have sufficient support.
• CES has won ballot initiatives in Fargo, ND (population 125k) and St Louis, MI (population 300k), at an average cost of $10 per voter. They have also organised a nationwide chapter system, outreach campaigns and a small research department. I'm confident they can replicate this success in other cities in the US, and think it's plausible they can scale to get approval voting used in some state gubernatorial races.

However, from a longtermist perspective, most local governments are of limited importance – what matters is mostly the decision of the US and other influential nation states, and some key international bodies.

CES may be able to have influence at the federal level by changing state-level voting rules on how senators and representatives are elected. This is not something they have accomplished yet, but would be a fairly natural extension of the work they have done so far. Additionally, they may be able to influence presidential primaries. Parties have significant leeway here, with substantial variation between states.

Influencing presidential elections would be significantly harder. Plurality and approval voting give effectively the same outcome in two-candidate races, which US presidential elections currently are de facto. If all states adopted approval voting, then presidential races could include a broader range of candidates. The best option is likely an interstate compact to adopt a national popular approval vote, which would require only a majority of states to adopt it.

I find the most plausible path to (long-term) impact being that CES continues to switch local jurisdictions to approval voting, and that this provides enough real-world demonstration of approval voting's value that new international institutions or nation states adopt it. Improving the composition of the Senate and House is also likely to provide some benefit, but I judge it to be smaller.

Supporting the use of better voting methods in U.S. elections.

This is an unrestricted grant to the Center for Election Science (CES). CES works to improve US elections by promoting approval voting, a voting method where voters can select as many candidates as they like (as opposed to the traditional voting method where you can only select one candidate).

Academic experts on voting theory widely consider approval voting to be a significant improvement over our current voting method (plurality voting), and our understanding is that approval voting on average produces outcomes that better reflect what voters actually want by preventing issues like vote splitting. I think that promoting approval voting is a potentially promising form of improving institutional decision making within government.

CES is a relatively young organization, but so far they have a reasonable track record. Previously, they passed a ballot initiative to adopt approval voting in the 120,000-person city of Fargo, ND, and are now repeating this effort in St. Louis. Their next goal is to get approval voting adopted in bigger cities and then eventually states.