[EM] Approval Voting in Action?

[Anthony Simmons]

Sayeth Alex Small:
Subject: [EM] Approval Voting in Action?

>> ALso, as for the comment of Anthony Simmons that AV is
>> more natural than IRV to people accustomed to plurality,
>> we also have a very strong notion of Majority Rule.
>> Normally our elections produce majorities, because
>> plurality discourages third parties.  When nobody wins a
>> majority people get upset (and probably rightly so,
>> although AV doesn't guarantee majorities).  With the
>> guarantee of a majority IRV seemed more natural to me
>> before I learned more about the subject.  (Of course, a
>> majority is about the ONLY guarantee you can get from
>> IRV).

Why settle for a majority?  Use Unanimous Instant Runoff
Voting.  With ordinary IRV, we stop the vote counting with
the round that gives one candidate a majority, while in UIRV,
rounds continue until all candidates but one have been
eliminated.  That candidate is the winner, and not only the
winner, but the unanimous winner.

An alternative is Majority Approval Voting (MAP), which is
just like ordinary AV except that after the tabulation is
completed, all of the votes are transferred to the person who
received the most, making the result unanimous.  Pretty much
the same idea as UIRV, but without the misdirection.

Perhaps we should ask just exactly what it means to get a
majority.  If it means just getting votes from more than half
of the electorate, then IRV and MAP both qualify.  But with
IRV, we're tricked into thinking that the winner is actually
preferred by a majority.  The reality is that what "majority"
means in this case is that the winner is merely preferred by
a majority over some other candidate(s), not overall.
Perhaps it would help if we had two words, "majority" for
"over half the people prefer this candidate to any other",
and "IRV majority" for "if you eliminate enough choices, over
half the people prefer this candidate to whatever's left".