[EM] Conditional YES votes

[Bart Ingles]

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.