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> I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electio

> I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-approval-vs-ranked-ballots/ 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 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.

brianolson 8y ago
"Approval Voting does surprisingly well" and I agree that it's a mathematically valid and efficient solution that does _surprisingly_ well, but other systems do better (Cordorcet, etc). Also in the messy human emotional sense, it's still _unsatisfying_ that I might Approval vote for Bernie and Hillary but I still want to say I like one better, and I still think that difference matters.
- jamesonquinn 8y ago
  The article focuses on approval versus IRV, and the advantages it gives for approval are valid. As you know, there are various other methods (Condorcet, STAR, 3-2-1, etc.) that keep most of approval's advantages, but sacrifice simplicity for better expressiveness. It would be as unreasonable for the advocates of such methods to try to undermine real-world campaigns for approval, as it would be for approval advocates to undermine those other methods.

brianolson 8y ago

"Approval Voting does surprisingly well" and I agree that it's a mathematically valid and efficient solution that does _surprisingly_ well, but other systems do better (Cordorcet, etc). Also in the messy human emotional sense, it's still _unsatisfying_ that I might Approval vote for Bernie and Hillary but I still want to say I like one better, and I still think that difference matters.

jamesonquinn 8y ago
The article focuses on approval versus IRV, and the advantages it gives for approval are valid. As you know, there are various other methods (Condorcet, STAR, 3-2-1, etc.) that keep most of approval's advantages, but sacrifice simplicity for better expressiveness. It would be as unreasonable for the advocates of such methods to try to undermine real-world campaigns for approval, as it would be for approval advocates to undermine those other methods.