Instant-runoff voting
Vote pairing is a voter strategy for single-winner elections, but it is made moot by the election system of instant-runoff voting, or ranked choice voting. Vote pairing allows a person to electorally support a candidate who is unlikely to win an election, without inadvertently preventing the election of another candidate whom they would otherwise prefer. Instant-runoff voting addresses this same problem within an official voting system. In instant-runoff voting, voters rank their choices. The vote counting runs through everyone's first choices and then the candidate who comes in last gets taken out. The votes of everyone who voted for that candidate then get redistributed to their second-choice candidates and the counting runs through everyone's new top choices again. The process repeats until there's only one candidate left. Advocates of vote pairing tend to simultaneously advocate instant-runoff voting in election reform.