@Jack-Waugh said in Advocacy Tailored to Location:

for a given locality, if they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV, then promote Score{1, .99, .01, 0} else promote Approval.

Without detracting from your goals here, I think it is worth considering a much smaller incremental change for places that already have IRV, which nonetheless solves significant problems and improves outcomes of elections.

The IRV halting condition is: “If one of the remaining candidates has more than half of the remaining votes, they win.”

That could be modified to: “If one of the remaining candidates would defeat all of the others head-to-head, they win.”

This small change turns IRV into not only a Condorcet method, but in fact a Smith method. The winner is guaranteed to be in the topologically highest strongly-connected-component of the pairwise results graph.

From an advocacy and education perspective, I suggest using the term “clear winner” in place of “Condorcet winner”. Then the new halting condition can be expressed succinctly as, “If one of the remaining candidates is a clear winner, they win.”

This phrasing also makes it easier to explain the problem being solved: the standard IRV method can fail to elect a clear winner. With this change to the halting condition, we can guarantee that won’t happen.

Objectively, the answer is Game Theory Voting. However, it is basically impossible to explain to, well, anyone.

The idea is that, given any two ranked-ballot voting methods, we can compare how many voters prefer the winner of one over the winner of the other, and vice versa. Essentially, treating the ballots as giving head-to-head votes between the candidates who would win under each method.

On average, in the long run, game theory voting will produce winners who are preferred by as many or more voters than the winner produced by any other method. In other words, there is no ranked-ballot voting system whose winners are preferred by more voters than the game-theory winner, over the long run.

It is a Condorcet method, and indeed a Smith method, however the actual tiebreaking procedure is a linear optimization problem, which can be solved using, eg. the simplex method, to find each candidate’s optimal probability of winning. The winner is then selected with those probabilities.