[EM] One man, one vote and Approval: Pragmatic Approach

Bart Ingles bartman at netgate.net
Sat Jul 27 19:28:24 PDT 2002


It seems clear that Craig has not yet grasped the concept of approval
voting, and doesn't understand why others might favor it.  Nobody here
who advocates approval voting does so for multi-seat elections.  Since
Craig's example is for a 3-seat election, the rest of his argument is
moot.

That aside, if there were a single-seat approval election with 45
candidates, each voter would be casting 45 votes (some to 'approve', and
the rest to 'not approve').  Under approval voting, checkmark is not the
same thing as a vote-- it is only one possible value for a vote.  Like a
one and a zero are possible values for a bit.

If you have two computers containing 20 GB hard drives, and initialize
one drive to contain all one bits, and the other to contain all zero
bits, do the two computers now contain different amounts of data?  Did
the drive containing all zeros vanish from existence when the last byte
was written?



Craig Carey wrote:
> 
> EXAMPLE showing Approval will get rejected by voters (if politicians
> pass it):
> 
>    1. Suppose that there are 45 candidates.
>    2. The number of seats to be filled equals 3. (3 winners).
>    3. Suppose that the latest poll data indicates that 14-20 of the
>        candidates running a close contest.
> [...]

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