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> 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

> 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

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

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