61–70 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet this would then increase spoilage significantly would it not?
It could be an additional multiple choice field, with N+1 options. Both would need to be filled in for the form to be valid.
Surely this disenfranchises those most willing to compromise, who are probably going to end up being those who support small parties? Let's say you a Right and Left party, and breakout Far Left which is actually very popular but has previously lacked electoral support due to its 'outsider' status. People's favourites might look like this: Right: 30% Left: 30% Far left: 40% However, 75% of Far Left favourites actually…
"Left" and "Right" are nearly meaningless when people can have stances on an issue-by-issue basis. As someone who has important disagreements with both big US parties, some would call me a moderate, and I feel disenfranchised by the current system, which doesn't let me pick the person whom I agree with most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also misleading because the simplicity of the appearance ballot paper disguises the complexity of the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you. (Am I better picking my favourite candidate only or both the candidates I don't find entirely unacceptable in a tight three way race?)
> the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you With approval voting, you should consider each candidate independently: "Am I okay with this person winning the election?" The number of circles you fill in doesn't matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what you mean by "'establishment' mediocrity". Nothing in your example means that the "Left" has to be "establishment" or "mediocrity".
I mean that we are left with a choice that has been traditionally dominant rather than a less prevalent but otherwise popular party.
It seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative consequence of electing a joke candidate, since you do not rank your choices nor are you limited to how many you can choose. Unfortunately, many voters would not give a second thought to ticking "Mickey Mouse" or similar in addition to their main choice and alternates, since there is no tradeoff involved. Under IRV or Ranked Choice, few voters wou…
I think we've already crossed that particular bridge.
Yep, IRV sends you right into the jaws of Arrow's Theorem which is not a nice place to be.
Approval Voting is the best balance between fairness and simplicity. I switched from IRV (RCV) to Approval Voting once I better understood the challenges of election administration. That said, FPTP is just about the worst. For election administration, it's the most brittle, where the margin of error too often exceeds the margin for winning. So I'd happily support IRV, RCV, score voting, approval voting as a replaceme…
It seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative consequence of electing a joke candidate, since you do not rank your choices nor are you limited to how many you can choose. Unfortunately, many voters would not give a second thought to ticking "Mickey Mouse" or similar in addition to their main choice and alternates, since there is no tradeoff involved. Under IRV or Ranked Choice, few voters wou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good winning over Ideal is a desired outcome when Ideal doesn't have the votes to win. That's one of the main attractions of non-plurality voting. The point of approval voting is not to rank candidates as Ideal > Good > Bad, that's what IRV is. Approval voting says, "These candidates are equally acceptable to me, so I'll be happy if any of them win over the candidates I didn't vote for."
Sure, but what the OP is saying is that in practice there's a massive tactical decision over whether to vote for "good" or not in a tight race, because "these candidates are equally acceptable to me" is a relatively rare situation
If a candidate is not acceptable, you don't vote for them. The situation you're describing is not one of selecting from Ideal, Good, Bad; it's the situation of selecting from Ideal, Somewhat Bad, Bad. If you're unwilling to vote for a candidate, they are by definition not "Good" to you. So you would just vote for the Ideal candidate in that situation.
In the worse case (everyone just votes for a single candidate), AV simply acts as FPTP. In the average and best case, the candidate that is acceptable to the most voters wins.
Look at it from the view of the US's extreme polarization: if I'm strongly for A, and you're strongly against A, nothing will be done if A wins. But I'm strongly for A, and we're both "meh" on B, then B might not get everything done that either of us wants, but at least the process won't completely break down.
What the article misses is that there are alternatives better than BOTH approval or IRV. I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. I will always find IRV to be dumb because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy. https://bolson.org/irv/
This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...
tl;dr
Total information throughput for a voting system is a function of THREE things:
1. Amount of information you can express on a ballot.
2. Accuracy of that information (which is distorted if the system gives you an incentive to dishonestly/tactically vote) .
3. Tabulation efficiency — how effectively does the system utilize the info on the ballots (for example there are numerous ranked voting systems from IRV, to Borda, to the entire Condorcet family; and IRV is extremely lossy) .
When you factor these all together, Approval Voting does surprisingly well, especially because it's so good at #2 and #3. See this graph of performance as measured by Bayesian regret. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Essentially what's happening is that the people who's approval threshold sits between candidates A and B (i.e. those people who only approve one of them) will, in a statistical sense, have about the same A-vs-B preference as the people who voted for both or neither of them. So the aggregate effect doesn't really suffer from your inability to express a ranked preference for all candidates. Voting is statistical.
To really drive that home, note that you could switch to a better voting method and STOP VOTING, and STILL get better election outcomes. The tiny impact your vote has on the process is statistically negligible. The properties of the voting system matter vastly more.