Approval voting
Voters tick every option they'd be happy with, and the one with the most approvals wins. It's the same ballot as plurality without the "pick only one" rule, and that one change stops similar options from splitting the vote.
Why it helps
If you like two similar options, tick both, and neither takes votes from the other. You can back a long shot you love and a safer choice you could live with, and neither vote is wasted. The winner is the option the most people are happy with, not just the favorite of the biggest group.
Choosing more than one winner
An approval poll on TallyLab can choose several winners, like two activities for a weekend away. Taking the top two would let the biggest group win both. Say 8 friends vote: 5 would enjoy fishing or hiking, and 3 only want the beach. Fishing and hiking get 5 approvals each and the beach gets 3, so the top two leave the beach group with nothing.
So TallyLab picks winners one at a time. Fishing and hiking tie in the first round, and a draw picks fishing. In the next round, anyone who approved fishing counts as half a vote, because they already have something they like. Hiking now has 2.5 votes against the beach's 3, so the beach wins the second spot and everyone gets something they voted for. With more winners, a voter counts as a third once two of their choices have won, a quarter after three, and so on.
This is sequential proportional approval voting, from the Danish mathematician Thorvald Thiele in the 1890s. When the group mostly agrees, it gives the same winners as taking the top few; it only differs when people split into camps.
Where it's used
The UN Security Council uses approval-style straw polls when choosing a Secretary-General. In the US, Fargo, North Dakota adopted approval voting in 2018 (the state banned it in 2025), and St. Louis has used it since 2021.
Criticisms
Ticking your second choice can help it beat your first, so you still have to decide where to draw the line. And a tick can't say which option you like more, or how much more: ranked choice shows the order, and STAR and quadratic voting show how much.