Many U.S. single-winner elections ask you to do something oddly narrow: pick exactly one name, even if you would be perfectly fine with two or three. That design choice is not a law of nature. It is a rule, and like any rule, it shapes behavior.
Approval voting rewrites that rule in the simplest possible way. Instead of forcing you to choose a single favorite, it lets you vote for every candidate you find acceptable. No ranking. No second round built into the method. No complicated tabulation. Just a ballot that admits a basic fact about voters: sometimes more than one option would be okay.
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What approval voting is
Approval voting is a method where each voter can select, or approve of, as many candidates as they want. You are not asked for a single favorite. You are asked who you can support.
The candidate with the most total approvals wins.
That is the core rule. A jurisdiction can still choose to add details around it, like recount thresholds, tie-break procedures, or an additional runoff layer, but the basic count is just approvals.
How a voter fills out the ballot
In a plurality election, the ballot tells you: choose one. Approval voting changes the instruction to: vote for all candidates you approve.
In practice, many voters treat it like a two-step question:
- Who do I genuinely like? Those candidates get checked.
- Who would I accept to hold this office? Those candidates can also get checked.
You can approve of one candidate, two candidates, five candidates, or none. Approving multiple candidates does not reduce the value of your approval for any of them.
How winners are counted
Election administrators tally approvals the same way they tally votes now, except each ballot can contribute to more than one candidate.
- Each candidate gets one approval for every ballot that marked them.
- The candidate with the highest number of approvals wins.
There is no need to reallocate votes or eliminate anyone. The counting logic is closer to a simple yes count than to a preference ranking.
Ties: What happens in a tie is jurisdiction-specific. Some places use an automatic recount, a runoff, or a random tie-break procedure set by law.
A simple example ballot
Here is what an approval voting ballot might look like for a mayoral race. The key is the instruction line.
Sample ballot
Mayor
Vote for all candidates you approve.
Now imagine 100 voters cast ballots:
- 45 approve Jordan Lee
- 52 approve Casey Rivera
- 20 approve Morgan Patel
- 18 approve Alex Chen
Casey Rivera wins with 52 approvals, even if many of those voters also approved someone else.
Because voters can approve more than one candidate, the approval totals across all candidates can add up to more than 100.
Notice what is happening: the winner is the person most voters can live with, not necessarily the person with the biggest loyal faction.
Where approval voting is used in U.S. elections
Approval voting is not the dominant method in the United States, but it is not hypothetical either. It has been adopted in a small number of public elections, and it is used by many private and civic organizations for internal decisions because it is easy to run.
Notable public uses
- Fargo, North Dakota adopted approval voting for city elections, with first use in 2020 municipal races.
- St. Louis, Missouri adopted a related system for its nonpartisan municipal elections, often described locally as an approval-style first round paired with a top-two general election. The change passed in 2020 and was first used in 2021.
Because election rules can change by city charter, local ordinance, or state law, approval voting in the U.S. has mostly moved through municipal reforms rather than national action. Adoption is limited and still evolving, and the details can vary from place to place.
How approval voting compares
These systems answer the same question, Who wins, but they ask voters for different information.
Plurality voting
How you vote: pick one candidate.
How you win: the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority.
What plurality incentivizes: strategic voting. If your favorite is unlikely to win, you may feel pressure to vote for a lesser evil to block your least favorite. That is the classic spoiler problem.
Runoff elections
How you vote: typically pick one candidate in the first round. If no one has a majority, the top two (or some threshold) advance to a second election.
How you win: majority in the final round.
What runoffs try to solve: legitimacy concerns when a winner takes office with, say, 35 percent. But runoffs can reduce turnout in the second round and cost more to administer.
Ranked-choice voting
How you vote: rank candidates in order of preference.
How you win: votes are reallocated as candidates are eliminated until someone reaches a majority (in single-winner RCV).
What RCV tries to solve: the spoiler effect and vote splitting, while capturing more nuance than a single choice. The tradeoff is that it requires more voter instruction and more complex tabulation.
Approval voting
How you vote: select every candidate you approve of.
How you win: highest number of approvals.
What approval voting does: it can reduce the penalty for supporting a minor candidate because you can also approve a frontrunner. In other words, it aims to blunt the spoiler effect without asking voters to rank.
Representation and the spoiler effect
Election systems are not just math. They are incentives, and incentives shape what candidates run, what coalitions form, and how honestly voters can express themselves.
Spoilers in plain terms
In plurality elections, a third candidate can change the outcome even if they have no path to winning. If they pull enough support from the major candidate closest to them, they can help elect the major candidate farthest from their supporters. That is a spoiler.
Approval voting can reduce that risk because a voter can approve their favorite minor candidate and also approve the major candidate they prefer among the front-runners. The voter is no longer forced to choose between sincerity and self-defense.
What representation can look like
Approval voting often rewards candidates with broader acceptability, not just intense base support. If a city is politically mixed, the winner can be someone who is an acceptable compromise for many groups rather than a candidate who excites one faction and alienates everyone else.
That can be a feature or a bug depending on what you want from elections: coalition-building and moderation, or clearer ideological contrast.
Pros and cons
Approval voting is appealing because it is simple, but simplicity does not mean no tradeoffs. Here are the big ones, tied directly to representation and spoilers.
Pros
- Reduces the spoiler effect. Voters can support a long-shot candidate without wasting their ballot, because they can also approve a viable alternative.
- Encourages broader coalitions. Candidates have a reason to seek second-choice acceptability, not just base turnout.
- Easy to explain and administer. The ballot looks familiar, the count is straightforward, and audits can be simpler than systems that reallocate votes.
- More expressive than plurality. Voters can signal acceptable options rather than being forced into one name.
Cons
- It can reward least-hated candidates. Broad acceptability can crowd out candidates with intense support, depending on how voters use approvals.
- Strategic incentives still exist. Some voters may choose bullet voting, approving only their favorite, to maximize that candidate’s edge. Others may set an informal approval threshold, approving everyone above a certain line and no one below it.
- No built-in majority guarantee. The winner is the top approval-getter, which might still be under 50 percent if voters approve sparsely.
- It gives less information than ranking. Approval ballots do not show whether you prefer Candidate A to Candidate B. They only show acceptability, not order.
- Edge-case rules vary. Recount triggers, overvote handling, and tie-breaks depend on local law and ballot design.
How it fits in real elections
Approval voting is often practical because many voting systems already support multi-select contests, like vote for up to three. The main change is legal and administrative: the ballot instruction, the way results are reported, and the rules for recounts and ties.
Voters can usually leave the contest blank, just as they can now. If a voter marks more candidates than allowed, it is treated as an overvote under that jurisdiction’s rules. Under approval, the allowed number is typically any number of candidates in that contest, so overvotes are less about too many checks and more about unclear marks or ballot errors.
What approval voting changes, constitutionally
Approval voting is usually not a constitutional amendment issue. States have broad authority to set the mechanics of state and local elections, subject to federal constraints like equal protection and federal voting rights statutes.
Federal elections add another layer: under the Constitution’s Elections Clause, states set the times, places, and manner of congressional elections, and Congress can alter those regulations. In practice, though, the core change here, how many bubbles you can fill, is still typically made through state law or local charter rules.
The question approval voting forces
Plurality voting treats elections like a single-choice purchase: pick one product and move on. But democracy is not shopping. It is collective decision-making among people who share a government even when they do not share an ideology.
Approval voting asks a different civic question: not Who is my perfect match, but Who is acceptable to govern alongside everyone else?
Whether you think that is a better model depends on what you want elections to reward: intensity, breadth, or some blend of both. And that is the real point. Voting rules are not neutral. They are a design decision, and we can choose differently.