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jimrandomh comments on Imperfect Voting Systems - Less Wrong
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I'm a big fan of approval voting, because while it does have strategic voting concerns, the way they work is intuitive. Instant-runoff's occasional non-monotonic results seem like inviting a scandal, and Condorcet seems too opaque and to ask for too many decisions.
What do you mean by 'too many decisions'?
I just mean that picking an ordering over options is harder than picking a preferred subset of those options, since there are n! choices rather than 2^n choices, and the simple criteria voters tend to come up with ("any candidate who supports policy X") tend to be boolean classifiers.
The reverse is true. Picking a subset is hard. For each of the candidates you have to consider whether the less preferred option that you predict has more potential is worth selecting despite the fact that it reduces the chances of your most preferred options. The same difficulty as with picking a single vote for a preferred candidate except multiplied and with much more challenge in second guessing the rest of the voters. Picking rankings completely removes that problem. Then, for any pairing that you don't have a clear preference ordering for you can put down randomly or arbitrarily and lose nothing.
If you account for the difficulty of picking candidates only, then yes. Practically the difficulty of navigating and filling the ballot should be considered too. People would quickly become angry when confronted with a task to check half of the 870 checkboxes printed on a ballot when choosing among 30 candidates/parties in an election. Even if it weren't mandatory to decide on all pairs, merely finding all of the 29 pairs your favourite takes part in would be a frustrating task for most citizens.
In many Condorcet systems, you don't need to provide a total ordering - you can have ties. In those systems and IRV, you can use a truncated ballot - any name not on the list is ranked at the bottom.
I don't have anything against Approval - I think it's a fine system, and easier to build hardware for - but I don't think ranking systems are all that problematic.
I think you underestimate how difficult it is to create a voting system that won't utterly baffle a large portion of the electorate. People in general aren't good about reading instructions, and they often get confused about the simplest of things. While I like both Condorcet and approval voting, I prefer approval voting for being stupidly simple. "Vote for the people you think would do a good job; the person with the most votes wins," is a very easy thing to understand, so most people will probably get it.
(Think I'm being too cynical? Try writing non-trivial instructions aimed at ordinary people. You'll see.)
What about a bubble-fill, with multiple bubbles per candidate? Instructions, beyond the standard how-to-darken-a-bubble stuff, amount to "fill in more bubbles for the candidate(s) you really like, fewer bubbles for the candidate(s) you don't like so much, and no bubbles for the candidate(s) you don't like at all." Maybe some examples. Vote-reader filters out the noise of exactly which bubbles were filled, then normalizes each ballot into a preference ranking, plus some implied trivia about preference strength.