[EM] Majority-Choice Approval

[Forest Simmons]

On Tue, 7 May 2002, Joe Weinstein wrote in part:

> Majority-Choice Approval not only truly solves the spoilage problem in a way
> that incorporates the three-level distinction, but it also solves the quite
> different ‘majority-rule’ problem - the other big preoccupation of IRVites,
> who however often confuse it with spoilage.
>
> Namely, in cases where a majority favorite does exist, Majority-Choice
> Approval enables majority rule.

Thanks to Joe for pointing this out. I almost forgot about the IRVist
obsession with trying to sell the majority of transferred votes (i.e. the
artificial majority) as THE MAJORITY.

I attended the FairVote Oregon meeting where they were sweating about how
to side step the objections of the Oregon Secretary of State and get that
kind of language into the ballot measure description.

They were pretty irritated with me when I pointed out that the Secretary
of State was right; it is unethical to try to obfuscate the artificial
nature of the IRV majority.


>
> Even better, with Majority-Choice Approval:  unless your greater-evil
> candidate really seems close to being a majority choice, you have no
> incentive to mark your lesser-evil compromise as ‘favored’.   For those who
> still worry about this, a simple variant of Majority-Choice Approval would
> suffice to remove such incentive: namely, define the winning majority
> percentage (for a favorite) to be something larger than 50, say 55.

This was the main reason that I originally considered limiting the
Favorite level to one approval (or two half approvals, etc.) per voter.
On that basis, any candidate that got more than fifty percent would also
win an Approval election in the perfect information case.

But I like the way that this idea has evolved.

Notice that the higher we put your proposed quota, the closer
Majority-Choice Approval approaches Three Slot Approval.

If the quota is 100 percent, then the Favorite category (almost surely)
loses its instrumentality and becomes expressive only.

Forest

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