In Iceland, the president is chosen by simple majority of votes. The sitting president got about 39% of the vote. There were 9 candidates. Of course, this problem is usually brushed off saying that this is a largely powerless office, the prime minister and his cabinet hold the executive power.

A majority of votes would be 50.1%. More votes than any other candidate is called a plurality.

Ranked choice voting? The one with a litany of famous theorems about how no ranked-choice voting system is satisfactory? (Arrow, Gibbard-Satterthwaite, &c.)

Why would one ever want ranked-choice voting? It isn't even deranged in a way that advantages some type of candidate, it's just mathematically deranged.

Does it not being satisfactory mean it's worse than FPTP voting in the case where you're electing a single person?

> Why isn't any fellow citizen a good leader than any other?

Because even you would agree that some people are better leaders than others.

People aren’t good at something (e.g. leading a country in the modern and complex time) juts because you wish it so.

Approval voting is just a different flavor of the same popular candidate tyranny. We need to be able to express support for non-duopoly candidates over the duopoly ones, and not continue to be held hostage fully supporting mainstream party #1 by the threat of mainstream party #2.

Unfortunately this devolves into geeking out over voting systems. Despite having the most popular support, Instant Runoff Voting is also a hot mess with its surprising nonintuitive outcomes. The way I see it, RCV/Condorcet is the way to go, regardless of the criticism that it allows for ties - it's criteria is straightforward and what most people would consider fair. Solve the ties with a tiebreaker IRV round (same input data type) or just a second election since they're going to be really rare with any significant population (how many times do we have ties with plurality?)

Hardly a nit when approval voting, unlike _any_ ranked-choice system, isn't mathematically shown to be inherently unsatisfactory.

Just pick your top 5 and it'll work out fine.

As long as you can answer a (long) series of "do you prefer A or B" questions, you can totally rank 82 people.

If I was voting in this election, I'm nearly certain I would not be able to answer that for most of the 82.

Well, if there's an A/B pair you can't separate, just pick either at random.

If my bottom 60 are all randomly shuffled then I haven't really ranked 82 people.