I hate FPTP polls. They don't measure how well candidates are liked. The best we get is that 25.7% like Rand Paul as their favorite. How does the other 74.3% feel about him though? They should at least do a second poll with approval voting. I'd bet the only reason Rand Paul does so well is because the other candidates split the vote.
Now that would be a cool thing. Having CPAC or other big conventions use instant runoff or the other types of voting to try to get a real answer, thereby proving how much better a system it is.
There are two basic kinds of voting methods: rated voting and preference voting. First past the post is a degenerate case of both of them.
Rated: give a rating to each candidate, a rating between two values. Then add up all the rating values for each candidate.
One can quantize the ratings, like making them 0, 0.5, 1. Reducing them to 0, 1 gives approval voting.
One can have some limit on what the ratings can add up to. If one quantizes the ratings, one can interpret the voting as having several votes that one can distribute however one likes -- either to one candidate or to several. That's cumulative voting.
Preference: put the candidates in order of one's preference in them. One can simplify it by having only a few top preferences.
There are various algorithms for counting up preference votes, some of them very complicated.
Borda: preference-to-rated translation. One's top preference gets n-1, the next one gets n-2, etc. where n is either the total number of candidates in the rate or the number of candidates that one gave preferences for.
Instant runoff voting: count the votes, and if a candidate gets a majority, then that one is the winner. Otherwise, remove the lowest-scoring candidate from the race and recount. Do as often as necessary before a candidate becomes a majority. A simplified version is instant top-two: first and second preferences only.
Condorcet methods: virtual round robin. Interpret the preference orders as each candidate vs. each other candidate, and count up how many such pairwise wins. If any candidate wins all such contests, then that one is the winner. Otherwise, do some rather complicated algorithm like Schulze beatpath or Tideman ranked pairs, or else Borda or IRV.