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Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual. Basically, vote for ALL of the candidates of whom you approv

Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual. Basically, vote for ALL of the candidates of whom you approve. Whoever gets the most approval (votes) wins. Simple. With a paper system such as we have in the UK, then if you don't like any of the candidates you can use a blank ballot paper to record your DISapproval, with the option that if the disapproval ballots exceed the winning total of approval votes then a new election should be called with a new slate. Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual. Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates. So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. > Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result. It's misleading to refer to a Condorcet winner as the "optimum" result - the Condorcet criterion is one criterion that an election method can satisfy, but it does not guarantee the "optimum" result by any other criterion. It's also doubly-misleading to refer to the Condorcet winner right after advocating approval voting, which does the exact opposite.
- wnoise 10y ago
  > So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. This is true, but not necessarily a bad thing at all. Democracy is a proxy for violence to prevent violence. Someone that everyone thinks is merely okay sounds better to me than one that is liked by a third and hated and despised by a third.
  - ScottBurson 10y ago
    No, it isn't true. If literally no voters would choose them over any other candidate, they're probably not going to get many votes. All voting systems have pathological cases. The question is how serious they are and how likely they are. There's a tendency for people to look at one of these cases and think that it is disqualifying, but that's not the right approach. One should look at the whole picture. Approval voting is a special case of range voting where there are only two values. For small numbers of voters, adding more values to choose from will help prevent the pathologies. For large numbers of voters, that's not necessary -- the statistics make it extremely likely that you get the right result. Every AV voter has to decide where their approval threshold is. For a candidate that they're iffy on, are they going to vote for or against them? If everybody has exactly the same threshold, then yes, pathologies become more likely. But in reality the thresholds will have some distribution, such that a candidate that everybody is iffy on will tend to get voted for by about half the people. If no other candidate tops that, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that AV returned the wrong result.
    - wnoise 10y ago
      I agree it's unlikely. I was just saying that when it does happen, it's actually a reasonable result.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I don't know how true that would be in the real world, but I know it would probably be the main objection to AV. That your second (or third, or fourth) preferred candidate got to win, instead of your first. Where, you, I guess is the majority here. As I'm sure the winner in any system likely isn't anywhere close to the favorite of those who lost. For RCV, the main objection is probably that it's more complicated. Then again, Americans use stuff like electoral college, and superdelegates, and caucuses, and coin flips, to decide elections, and in comparison to all of that, the RCV system seems easy (just rank candidates in order of preference). So RCV probably has the "easy" objection between the two.
- hx87 10y ago
  > So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. If voters disagree about who the "other candidates" are, I don't see that as a problem.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  > So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. You're asking us to imagine a scenario in which there is a single issue on which one candidate's position is very popular, but despite that, no other candidate who takes that position on that issue is acceptable to as many voters. In the kind of multi-candidate race that AV is intended to encourage, that seems unlikely to me, at least if the race is one of any importance. And don't you think the other candidates are going to point out that the single-issue candidate is exactly that? Single-issue voting is certainly a problem -- one we have already -- but I don't see that AV makes it worse; in fact I think it would help, a lot!, by allowing races in which both centrists and more extreme candidates run. BTW I agree with you that the Condorcet criterion is overemphasized.
- ClayShentrup 10y ago
  > Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates. Approval Voting performs exceptionally well as measured by Bayesian Regret. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html There's also a theorem that it elects beats all winners given plausible models of voter strategy. http://scorevoting.net/AppCW.html http://scorevoting.net/AppCW.html Clay Shentrup Cofounder, The Center for Election Science
mtgx 10y ago
I've seen the data (at least from the organizations that support approval voting), and it seems to deliver the most optimum results. However, I have some concerns. The way I see the two voting systems is like this: Advantages approval voting: - much simpler - eliminates spoiler effect - may give third-party candidates better chances in most elections - reduces negative campaigning, since the winner would have to be "approved" by like 70% of the country in typical elections. Disadvantages AV: - the winner may be someone who was #2 on 80% of the country's wishlist. So 51% of country won't love the candidate, as they may with RCV or two-round voting systems, but also the other 49% won't hate the candidate (perhaps only 20% will). So from that point of view, it would be "better". But it would be someone most are just content with. - I believe even the organizations supporting it admit that it would lead to "centrist" leaders. Perhaps in most situations a centrist is preferable, but what if the country has gone in the wrong direction for 2 decades, and it needs a completely new direction? Would a centrist still be enough? Or would the approval voting system and people pick exactly the guy that is willing to go in a different direction this one time? I'm not sure what would happen in this scenario. Advantages RCV: - eliminates spoiler effect - also reduces negative campaigning, because a candidate would need some of the opponent's voters, too, to rank them as #2 on their list. - easier transition to multi-winner RCV system for state legislature and Congress - and this alone is much bigger than just using approval voting system. Proportional representation beats all single-winner voting systems, including approval voting Disadvantages RCV: - it may eliminate spoiler effect, but other than that, it won't do much else to help third-parties. The main two parties would likely still be elected for a long time, at least until population's thinking about at least one of the the two parties changes in a major way - a bit more complicated to understand how votes are counted by the average person, and a higher number of "lost" votes (I believe 5% or so, compared to about 1% or less for AV). I believe both could also be used strategically - as in rank #1 the person you think is more likely to win with RCV, or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people. So I would qualify the two as: AV would be a great improvement over FPTP, while RCV would be a moderate, but still well worth it and welcome improve, for the fact that it would eliminate spoiler effect alone. However, if single-winner RCV makes it much more likely that multi-winner RCV (STV) is also adopted for state legislature and Congress, then I would definitely choose RCV over AV, because the ultimate goal should be to adopt proportional representation in the US. I think proportional representation coupled with a limit of $200 of individual donations and a ban on any other political donations would greatly improve democracy in the US, and these are the main changes Americans should fight for, if they want all of the other issues (as Lessig often says) to be solved as well. First fix democracy and change the system to a better one, so that the people that actually represent you get to pass laws in your favor for whatever issue you (the People) want.
bluecaribou 10y ago
Pitting "ranked choice" versus "approval" (versus "range") voting is not really the way to think about it. Consider a "relaxed" version of ranked choice where voters are allowed to give multiple candidates the same rank. (Sometimes voters really do have no preference between two candidates.) Approval voting then is just a "restricted" subset of "relaxed ranked choice". That is, any preference expressed in an approval voting ballot can also be expressed in a relaxed ranked choice ballot. Similarly, relaxed ranked choice voting can be considered a restricted subset of range voting. And our traditional "single choice" voting can be considered a restricted subset of all of them. And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems. So, clearly range voting is in some sense the best (or tied for the best) ballot, in the sense that it allows the voter to express a range of preferences that is a superset of the other systems. But there is also the issue of ballot simplicity. Some people might prefer the simpler ballots of the approval system, or even the traditional single choice system. But since those ballots have corresponding "range voting" ballots, you can deploy a "range voting" election while allowing voters to use the kind of ballot they are comfortable with. Indeed you can imagine the idea of a "progressive ballot" in which the voter starts of with a simple "single choice" ballot, and can optionally refine their preferences with an approval ballot, then a ranked choice ballot, then, ultimately a "range" ballot. I've actually implemented such a thing [1]. [1] http://macd.tk/pollplace http://macd.tk/pollplace - Note, this is running on an underpowered test server not intended for public use, so be gentle.
- bradbeattie 10y ago
  > And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Thank you for highlighting that. Too often the ballot and the aggregation method are conflated. On https://modernballots.com/elections/zombies/vote/ https://modernballots.com/elections/zombies/vote/ I implemented 5-star ratings as the default. Everyone's familiar with this kind of rating and it allows indifference between two options.
- bhauer 10y ago
  > Pitting "ranked choice" versus "approval" (versus "range") voting is not really the way to think about it. Consider a "relaxed" version of ranked choice where voters are allowed to give multiple candidates the same rank. (Sometimes voters really do have no preference between two candidates.) I think Ranked versus Approval/Score is a proper comparison. Ranked voting requires that you order candidates. That additional complexity is undesirable to proponents of Approval or Score Voting, such as myself. You've suggested removing the requirement to order candidates and called it "Relaxed Ranked Voting." Removing the ordering requirement makes "Relaxed Ranked Voting" approximately equivalent to Score Voting (sometimes known as "Range Voting") [1]. The difference is that the numbers are reversed. In Score Voting with a range of 0 to 100, the highest score—that is, 100—is given the the candidate(s) you like the most. In your "Relaxed Ranked Voting," I assume the best score would be a 1. This seems needlessly confusing to the voter. Just use a scoring system that everyone is familiar with from public high school, where 100 is the best. Relaxed Ranked Voting seems additionally complicated by each elected office on a ballot having its own bounds (a three-candidate race would presumably permit scores of 1 to 3; a five candidate race would be 1 to 5; etc.) Meanwhile, Score Voting, once adopted, would use a consistent score range for all elected offices. For example, 100 is always best. Am I missing something else about Relaxed Ranked Voting that makes you prefer it versus Score Voting? I find it frustrating that IRV has more momentum than Approval and Score. I am worried that we will squander an opportunity to adopt a truly superior system such as Approval or Score voting [2] if we end up with IRV. I want to get rid of Plurality as much as anyone, but replacing it with IRV seems a half-success that will temporarily exhaust regular voters' tolerance of change. As you point out, a reason so many of us on the Approval and Score Voting hype-train talk about Approval more than Score is that it's largely compatible with existing ballots. You just mark as many as you want. Super simple. In fact, I argue that Approval voting is simpler than plurality voting because it removes the "select only one" constraint. [1] https://electology.org/score-voting https://electology.org/score-voting [2] https://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv https://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual No, Approval Voting only makes any sense when approval has concrete meaning, as in a case wherected you are voting on a group activity, and voting "approve" on an alternative is also a binding commitment to participate if that option is chosen (or, conversely, voting not to approve is a binding waiver of participation.)

chimeracoder 10y ago

> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual. Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates. So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. > Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result. It's misleading to refer to a Condorcet winner as the "optimum" result - the Condorcet criterion is one criterion that an election method can satisfy, but it does not guarantee the "optimum" result by any other criterion. It's also doubly-misleading to refer to the Condorcet winner right after advocating approval voting, which does the exact opposite.

wnoise 10y ago
> So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. This is true, but not necessarily a bad thing at all. Democracy is a proxy for violence to prevent violence. Someone that everyone thinks is merely okay sounds better to me than one that is liked by a third and hated and despised by a third.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  No, it isn't true. If literally no voters would choose them over any other candidate, they're probably not going to get many votes. All voting systems have pathological cases. The question is how serious they are and how likely they are. There's a tendency for people to look at one of these cases and think that it is disqualifying, but that's not the right approach. One should look at the whole picture. Approval voting is a special case of range voting where there are only two values. For small numbers of voters, adding more values to choose from will help prevent the pathologies. For large numbers of voters, that's not necessary -- the statistics make it extremely likely that you get the right result. Every AV voter has to decide where their approval threshold is. For a candidate that they're iffy on, are they going to vote for or against them? If everybody has exactly the same threshold, then yes, pathologies become more likely. But in reality the thresholds will have some distribution, such that a candidate that everybody is iffy on will tend to get voted for by about half the people. If no other candidate tops that, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that AV returned the wrong result.
  - wnoise 10y ago
    I agree it's unlikely. I was just saying that when it does happen, it's actually a reasonable result.
mtgx 10y ago
I don't know how true that would be in the real world, but I know it would probably be the main objection to AV. That your second (or third, or fourth) preferred candidate got to win, instead of your first. Where, you, I guess is the majority here. As I'm sure the winner in any system likely isn't anywhere close to the favorite of those who lost. For RCV, the main objection is probably that it's more complicated. Then again, Americans use stuff like electoral college, and superdelegates, and caucuses, and coin flips, to decide elections, and in comparison to all of that, the RCV system seems easy (just rank candidates in order of preference). So RCV probably has the "easy" objection between the two.
hx87 10y ago
> So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. If voters disagree about who the "other candidates" are, I don't see that as a problem.
ScottBurson 10y ago
> So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. You're asking us to imagine a scenario in which there is a single issue on which one candidate's position is very popular, but despite that, no other candidate who takes that position on that issue is acceptable to as many voters. In the kind of multi-candidate race that AV is intended to encourage, that seems unlikely to me, at least if the race is one of any importance. And don't you think the other candidates are going to point out that the single-issue candidate is exactly that? Single-issue voting is certainly a problem -- one we have already -- but I don't see that AV makes it worse; in fact I think it would help, a lot!, by allowing races in which both centrists and more extreme candidates run. BTW I agree with you that the Condorcet criterion is overemphasized.
ClayShentrup 10y ago
> Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates. Approval Voting performs exceptionally well as measured by Bayesian Regret. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html There's also a theorem that it elects beats all winners given plausible models of voter strategy. http://scorevoting.net/AppCW.html http://scorevoting.net/AppCW.html Clay Shentrup Cofounder, The Center for Election Science

mtgx 10y ago

I've seen the data (at least from the organizations that support approval voting), and it seems to deliver the most optimum results. However, I have some concerns. The way I see the two voting systems is like this: Advantages approval voting: - much simpler - eliminates spoiler effect - may give third-party candidates better chances in most elections - reduces negative campaigning, since the winner would have to be "approved" by like 70% of the country in typical elections. Disadvantages AV: - the winner may be someone who was #2 on 80% of the country's wishlist. So 51% of country won't love the candidate, as they may with RCV or two-round voting systems, but also the other 49% won't hate the candidate (perhaps only 20% will). So from that point of view, it would be "better". But it would be someone most are just content with. - I believe even the organizations supporting it admit that it would lead to "centrist" leaders. Perhaps in most situations a centrist is preferable, but what if the country has gone in the wrong direction for 2 decades, and it needs a completely new direction? Would a centrist still be enough? Or would the approval voting system and people pick exactly the guy that is willing to go in a different direction this one time? I'm not sure what would happen in this scenario. Advantages RCV: - eliminates spoiler effect - also reduces negative campaigning, because a candidate would need some of the opponent's voters, too, to rank them as #2 on their list. - easier transition to multi-winner RCV system for state legislature and Congress - and this alone is much bigger than just using approval voting system. Proportional representation beats all single-winner voting systems, including approval voting Disadvantages RCV: - it may eliminate spoiler effect, but other than that, it won't do much else to help third-parties. The main two parties would likely still be elected for a long time, at least until population's thinking about at least one of the the two parties changes in a major way - a bit more complicated to understand how votes are counted by the average person, and a higher number of "lost" votes (I believe 5% or so, compared to about 1% or less for AV). I believe both could also be used strategically - as in rank #1 the person you think is more likely to win with RCV, or only vote for the person that's more likely to win with AV, instead of multiple people. So I would qualify the two as: AV would be a great improvement over FPTP, while RCV would be a moderate, but still well worth it and welcome improve, for the fact that it would eliminate spoiler effect alone. However, if single-winner RCV makes it much more likely that multi-winner RCV (STV) is also adopted for state legislature and Congress, then I would definitely choose RCV over AV, because the ultimate goal should be to adopt proportional representation in the US. I think proportional representation coupled with a limit of $200 of individual donations and a ban on any other political donations would greatly improve democracy in the US, and these are the main changes Americans should fight for, if they want all of the other issues (as Lessig often says) to be solved as well. First fix democracy and change the system to a better one, so that the people that actually represent you get to pass laws in your favor for whatever issue you (the People) want.

bluecaribou 10y ago

Pitting "ranked choice" versus "approval" (versus "range") voting is not really the way to think about it. Consider a "relaxed" version of ranked choice where voters are allowed to give multiple candidates the same rank. (Sometimes voters really do have no preference between two candidates.) Approval voting then is just a "restricted" subset of "relaxed ranked choice". That is, any preference expressed in an approval voting ballot can also be expressed in a relaxed ranked choice ballot. Similarly, relaxed ranked choice voting can be considered a restricted subset of range voting. And our traditional "single choice" voting can be considered a restricted subset of all of them. And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Those are separate things that, in theory, can be mixed-and-matched to produce various voting systems. So, clearly range voting is in some sense the best (or tied for the best) ballot, in the sense that it allows the voter to express a range of preferences that is a superset of the other systems. But there is also the issue of ballot simplicity. Some people might prefer the simpler ballots of the approval system, or even the traditional single choice system. But since those ballots have corresponding "range voting" ballots, you can deploy a "range voting" election while allowing voters to use the kind of ballot they are comfortable with. Indeed you can imagine the idea of a "progressive ballot" in which the voter starts of with a simple "single choice" ballot, and can optionally refine their preferences with an approval ballot, then a ranked choice ballot, then, ultimately a "range" ballot. I've actually implemented such a thing [1]. [1] http://macd.tk/pollplace http://macd.tk/pollplace - Note, this is running on an underpowered test server not intended for public use, so be gentle.

bradbeattie 10y ago
> And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner. Thank you for highlighting that. Too often the ballot and the aggregation method are conflated. On https://modernballots.com/elections/zombies/vote/ https://modernballots.com/elections/zombies/vote/ I implemented 5-star ratings as the default. Everyone's familiar with this kind of rating and it allows indifference between two options.
bhauer 10y ago
> Pitting "ranked choice" versus "approval" (versus "range") voting is not really the way to think about it. Consider a "relaxed" version of ranked choice where voters are allowed to give multiple candidates the same rank. (Sometimes voters really do have no preference between two candidates.) I think Ranked versus Approval/Score is a proper comparison. Ranked voting requires that you order candidates. That additional complexity is undesirable to proponents of Approval or Score Voting, such as myself. You've suggested removing the requirement to order candidates and called it "Relaxed Ranked Voting." Removing the ordering requirement makes "Relaxed Ranked Voting" approximately equivalent to Score Voting (sometimes known as "Range Voting") [1]. The difference is that the numbers are reversed. In Score Voting with a range of 0 to 100, the highest score—that is, 100—is given the the candidate(s) you like the most. In your "Relaxed Ranked Voting," I assume the best score would be a 1. This seems needlessly confusing to the voter. Just use a scoring system that everyone is familiar with from public high school, where 100 is the best. Relaxed Ranked Voting seems additionally complicated by each elected office on a ballot having its own bounds (a three-candidate race would presumably permit scores of 1 to 3; a five candidate race would be 1 to 5; etc.) Meanwhile, Score Voting, once adopted, would use a consistent score range for all elected offices. For example, 100 is always best. Am I missing something else about Relaxed Ranked Voting that makes you prefer it versus Score Voting? I find it frustrating that IRV has more momentum than Approval and Score. I am worried that we will squander an opportunity to adopt a truly superior system such as Approval or Score voting [2] if we end up with IRV. I want to get rid of Plurality as much as anyone, but replacing it with IRV seems a half-success that will temporarily exhaust regular voters' tolerance of change. As you point out, a reason so many of us on the Approval and Score Voting hype-train talk about Approval more than Score is that it's largely compatible with existing ballots. You just mark as many as you want. Super simple. In fact, I argue that Approval voting is simpler than plurality voting because it removes the "select only one" constraint. [1] https://electology.org/score-voting https://electology.org/score-voting [2] https://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv https://electology.org/approval-voting-versus-irv

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual No, Approval Voting only makes any sense when approval has concrete meaning, as in a case wherected you are voting on a group activity, and voting "approve" on an alternative is also a binding commitment to participate if that option is chosen (or, conversely, voting not to approve is a binding waiver of participation.)