Preference Votin vs Approval Voting

[John De Lasaux]

If what Donalds says is true, his post herein makes such eminent sense that
discussion of  Approval methods should be immediately dropped as being
worthless.

Voters have absolutely NO interest in making a SECOND selection unles they
can be assured that it doesn't color the count relative to their FIRST
selection.

By the way, looking at the history of the most rudimentary, simple election
counting in Maricopa County, Arizona I would be most reluctant to even vote
in an election in which there was some complex algorithm required to be
computed to determine the winner. Our experience here is that they install a
new system every election cycle, and the software never works as promised.
With a complex algorithm, I would worry that, either intentionally or
because of stupidity, the formula used was actually incorrect and selected
the wrong winner!

John D
=====================

At 09:57 AM 4/19/97 -0400, election-methods-list at eskimo.com wrote:
>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
>
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John De Lasaux

Truth to a Politican is like Sunlight to a Vampire!