[EM] Ranked Approval Voting (RAV)

[Chris Benham]

Russ,
You wrote (Sun. Mar.13):

"Since we're discussing names for election methods, I'd like to propose
one: Ranked Approval Voting (RAV).

RAV works as follows:

The voter ranks the approved candidates only. The CW wins if one exists,
otherwise the least approved candidate is eliminated until a CW is found."

I think that with pre-polls and strategy, this would usually give the 
same result as IRV.  In the three-candidate case,
I see it only giving a different result when a lot of voters have a big 
sincere ratings gap between their second and third
choice and yet they wouldn't  be prepared to order-reverse (Compromise) 
in IRV.
Otherwise, parties/candidates that see themselves as having a chance of 
winning will advise their supporters to bullet-vote,
and the same candidates as in IRV will be eliminated.

What is your argument against the even simpler:
"Voters rank the candidates they approve. Elect the CW if there is one, 
otherwise elect the Approval winner" ?
(or a slightly more complex version that stipulates that the winner must 
be in the Schwartz or Smith set?).

You wrote:
"Another variation of RAV could be to allow the voter to rank all the
candidates and also specify an Approval cutoff. I like that method, but
I think the requirement for specifying an Approval cutoff separate from
the rankings themselves will only confuse voters and make the method a
harder sell -- with little if any added benefit. The rankings of the
unapproved candidates are likely to be strategic anyway: most voters
will probably "bury" the unapproved candidate with the best chance of
winning, regardless of their true ranking of that candidate."

I think if my  Approval Margins or  James Green Armytage's excellent 
Approval-Weighted Pairwise method is used
then voters can be truthfully advised that they can gain nothing or 
almost nothing by truncating  or Burying, and so it
is much more likely that there will be a voted CW and the "added 
benefit"  would be great.
But I agree that these methods don't have brief easy-to-market 
descriptions, and just having a approval cutoff as well
as rankings would be a more radical change than just using ranked-ballots.

Chris Benham