My tendency is towards preferring IRV to this because IRV has more of a proven track record in other countries, but yes, this would be a massive improvement over the current system.
Do you agree with my problems with it, though? This system would communicate more information about each voter's preferences, which is why I think it's superior.
I think that could be argued either way; this system is better at communicating which candidates a voter could actually tolerate having in office and which they couldn't, but IRV has more granularity regarding how much a voter likes or dislikes a candidate relative to other candidates.
I wonder if there's some way to design a hybrid system that incorporates approval/disapproval into IRV. IRV definitely has some granularity about how much a voter likes or dislikes a candidate, but it doesn't distinguish between cases where you like your first choice 100% more than your second and where you like your first choice 1% more than your second. And it has no regard for where your preferences slip from "I approve of these candidates" to "I disapprove of these candidates." You usually have the option to stop ranking after the candidates you approve, but that's just giving up the chance to express any further preference among those candidates you disapprove.
Maybe a two-sided IRV, that would ask voters to rank candidates and also to put in a breakpoint where they move from approval to disapproval, and then tabulates not only the candidate with the most first choice votes, but the candidate with the most last choice votes. I might have a ballot that looks like:
Approve:
1) Warren
2) Harris
3) Biden
Disapprove:
4) Weld
5) Walsh
6) Trump
People could still leave candidates out of their rankings, but the first candidates would represent their strongest approvals and the last would represent their strongest disapprovals.
I don't know quite how this would be tabulated. Maybe instead of simply casting out the candidate with the lowest first choice approval, they could cast out the candidate with the highest first choice disapproval? Or a hybrid approach, where each candidate is ranked on both scales, and the candidate whose summed scores are highest is eliminated (for instance, say there are 20 candidates; candidate A has the 20th most first choice approval votes, but only the 5th most first choice disapproval votes, giving them a score of 25; candidate B has the 15th most first choice approval votes, but also the 15th most first choice disapproval votes, giving them a score of 30).
Anyway, this is all off the top of my head, and may be totally crazy. But one of the weaknesses of basic IRV is that strong second choice consensus picks can get tossed in the early rounds because they don't have that much first choice support.
