Majority YES Requirement

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Demorep says:

Supplement-

1. Votes in simple Approval Voting have a de facto YES component.

Mike says:

No, because y/n voting on candidates means that each candidate
is _individually_ qualified or disqualified by whether he gets
more yes votes or no votes. Approval votes are just votes, or
points. It's true that in our state initiatives, when there are
several competing initiatives, the yes votes that an initiative
gets are counted as votes in the determination of which passing
initiative is enacted. But that doesn't mean that Approval's
votes are yesses in the sense that we use the term in y/n voting.

Demorep says:

It is because there is no number ranking of AV votes that it is
defective (in
not having head to head pairings if 2 or more AV choices get majority votes)
(noting that a majority requirement is not part of simple AV).

Mike says:

People in England, and probably other countries, consider "AV"
to stand for the Alternative Vote (IRV). Since there are people
using it either way, I avoid using that abbreviation. If you
want to abbreviate Approval, how about App or ApV?

If one insists on a rank method then any nonranked method is
automatically "defective" to that person, because it lacks
rank balloting. But I prefer to judge method defectiveness in
terms of its results. Approval does remarkably well by the
criteria that relate to majority rule & the lesser-of-2-evils
problem.

As for not recognizing candidate who has a 1st choice majority,
that can be remedied. Someone in L.A. suggested "Favorite Approval":

The ballot has the usual Approval ballot section, listing each
candidate, and providing a place to mark that candidate. It
has another identical section. The first ballot section is
for the usual Approval voting, having the instruction "Vote for
1 or more." The 2nd ballot section has the instruction: "Vote
for 1", or "Vote for your favorite."

If a candidate gets a majority on the vote-for-1 ballot section,
he wins. Otherwise we elect the winner from the Approval vote,
on the other ballot section. Of course if someone marks a
candidate as their favorite on the vote-for-1 section, and
leaves him out of the Approval section, that can be assumed to
mean that that voter believed that it wasn't necessary to
mark him again, and that voter would be counted as giving an
Approval vote to that candidate as well as a 1st choice vote.

Favorite-Approval answers the objection about not detecting
1st choice majorities and not encouraging people to register
their favotites.

I'd welcome FA as an improvement, though it would slightly
compromise the simplicity of Approval, and would keep me from
being able to say that absolutely no change in the ballot
is needed other than changing "Vote for 1" to "Vote for 1 or more."

If people feel as you do about 1st choice majority & registering
favorites, then FA would likely have a better chance. I feel that
it should be mentioned in Approval proposals for that reason.
But ordinary Approval is still the _minimal change sw reform_,
and that helps its proposability, because there's less to
convince people to agree to, and it requires fewer words to
state the proposal.


Demorep says:

2. Laws should NOT get passed by any plurality (high or low) that is less
than a majority of the voters or the legislators having a majority of the
voting power in a legislative body.

Mike says:

Status quo should always be one of the alternatives when voting
among non-person alternatives. If there are several alternatives
for a law, and status quo is favored over the other alternatives
even by a mere plurality in the pairwise comparisons, then
none of the new laws will be adopted. If status-quo can't even
win pairwise comparisons over the others, then there'd be
not much case for keeping the status quo, unless it wins
the circular tiebreaker.

When there are, say, 7 alternatives for a law, it's easy &
common for none of them to get a 1st choice majority. Maybe
one of them could beat each of the others in separate pairwise
votes, maybe even by majority. Use a circular tie solution
that respects majority; you know which one that is.

But I question the meaningfulness of just comparing each
alternative to status-quo in separate votes. And why give
status quo such special status. Let it compete as an ordinary
alternative.

Demorep says:

What chance will simple Condorcet have in being enacted in real politics 
land

Unless we try it in real world land, instead of just questioning
its winnability in hypothetical all-talk fantasy land, we won't
know. It would be best to find out by trying it.
I've had good success explaining SD & SSD to people who'd had
no previous exposure to voting systems.

If by simple Condorcet, you mean Condorcet without y/n voting,
I point out that our Plurality elections don't have y/n voting
either. Yes, they have primaries. Ok, then have primaries with
Condorcet or Approval too, if people feel it necessary for any
reason. If you mean Plain Condorcet, it has the advantage of
the most simplicity, though it doesn't have the absolute
uncriticizability of the Cycle Condorcet methods. And SD rivals
Plain Condorcet in simplicity, and has IRV beat in that regard.

Demorep says:

How much chance would non-y/n Condorcet have
(among "average" devious candidates and voters) if it does not have a
majority YES requirement for the election of major single winner elective
officers (presidents, governors, mayors, etc.) ???

That won't hurt non-y/n Condorcet's chances, because Plurality
already doesn't have y/n voting. In fact Condorcet, without y/n
voting, respects majorities much better than Plurality does.

Mike Ossipoff
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