Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a better voting system (e.g. Approval or Condorcet) and nothing preventing a dozen candidates from running, that would be much more feasible. These go hand in hand: our current voting system breaks down if multiple candidates draw votes from each other, but a better voting system would be immune to that failure mode and could give people a free choice of several reasonable candidates without having some of them…
Sure or some simplified version of ranked choice voting. Perhaps where only the top two choices get counted instead of having unlimited ranked choices (which can get messy and be harder to audit).
In models that ignore some of people's preferences, voting "1 Preferred, 2 Lesser Evil, 3 Greater Evil" is dangerous, because your preference for Lesser Evil over Greater Evil is ignored. This creates an incentive for people to keep voting the way they do now, with the compromise candidate on the top.
Approval makes sense because it's easy to explain. Condorcet makes sense because it's relatively close to ideal at the cost of making it slightly more complex to vote. Any model of the form "Ranked choice, but ignore some of the preferences" is the worst of both worlds: more complex to vote, but doesn't produce as good of an outcome.