Preference Votin vs Approval Voting

New Democracy donald at mich.com
Sat Apr 19 06:57:17 PDT 1997


Dear List members,

MikeS wrote:>
My "voting design" philosophy: 1) Give the voters maximum freedom to express
their true feelings (rated votes), then 2) Design the scoring system to
maximize the incentive to vote honestly.

Donald writes:
     Knowledgeable voters will prefer one candidate over the rest. The true
feelings of these voters is to support this number one candidate to the
hilt until that candidate is a winner or is dropped. Then the voter wants
to be able to salvage his vote and use it on a second preference.
Preference Voting gives the voter the ability to do this - Approval Voting
does not.

     In an Apporval Voting election a voter's lower selections receive
support while the first selection is still a contender. Savvy voters will
see this in Approval Voting and will refuse to make more than one
selection.

     It will not matter how you weight the votes - you are still giving
support to lower candidates while number one is still in the race - a
condition that the voters will not accept.

     This unacceptable support of lower candidates also exists in the Borda
and Condorcet methods.

Don,

Donald Eric Davison of New Democracy at http://www.mich.com/~donald

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -





More information about the Election-Methods mailing list