[EM] Conditional YES votes

Bart Ingles bartman at netgate.net
Wed Mar 15 10:36:21 PST 2000


DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Simple Approval Voting has the rather major defect of having a later vote
> cancel out an earlier vote.

That's not a defect, it's a feature!  And it doesn't cancel out the
earlier vote, since the earlier vote still counts against non-approved
candidates.

One benefit of not allowing the voter to distinguish between levels of
approval is that the voter will not add a second vote unless she
believes the compromise choice to be a good one.  This avoids the
situation that can happen with ranked methods, which can elect a
candidate whom the majority feel is only slightly better than the worst
possible choice.

Although apparently with all or nearly all ranked methods, a
sophisticated utility-maximizing voter would refuse to rank choices
below a certain level.  But this strategy may not be obvious to many
voters -- the best strategies for ranked methods tend to be less
intuitive that for approval voting.

Another benefit, of course, is that there is no problem with insincere
order reversal.



More information about the Election-Methods mailing list