[SPAM: #] [EM] Approval Strategy

[Forest Simmons]

Simple answer for the man on the street:

Approve the candidate that you would vote for under Plurality, as well as
every candidate that you like better.

Civic minded voters can learn refinements of this basic (and perfectly
adequate) strategy as easily as they can learn the rules of football and
soccer.


On Thu, 7 Aug 2003 Dgamble997 at aol.com wrote:

>
> If people will only approve one front-runner why bother with Approval ?
> surely you'll get exactly the same results as with plurality.

(1) Election outcomes are not the only "results" of elections: ask the
Nader supporters in Florida and other swing states who didn't dare vote
for him.

Why do you suppose that Nader got the greatest percentage of votes in
states like Alaska where he was so unpopular, and Bush so popular, that
there was no chance of him spoiling things for Gore?

(2) Also, two party politics have conditioned us to think that there can
only be two viable candidates.

(3) Primaries are unnecessary under Approval voting; approve as many
candidates from your party as you like.

(4) When probabilities are involved, "almost surely" is safer than
"surely."

For example, polls may be misleading. It isn't impossible that (according
to the polls) the two leading contenders A and B are running neck and neck
(49 and 51 percent, say) while another candidate C is actually the
favorite of 52 percent of the electorate, but out of favor with the
corporate pollsters.

20 A >> (various unapproved)
29 C ... A >>
23 C ... B >>
28 B >>

Since the voters have nothing to lose by approving favorite, under
approval candidate C wins, even though every voter (following the basic
strategy) approved one of the supposed front runners as well.

Far fetched?  An informal Time Magazine Website poll put Nader far ahead
of both Gore and Bush for the last several weeks leading up to the
presidential election.  It was of the form: "Which candidate do you like
the best?"  rather than "Which candidate do you intend to vote for?"

The "for whom will you vote?" style polls always found Nader near the
bottom.

If the last US presidential election had been conducted under Approval,
assuming that those who voted for Nader under plurality would approve only
Nader, and assuming that more of the disenchanted (effectively
disenfranchised) would have turned out to vote, the results could well be
Nader 40% approval, Gore 37% approval, Bush 36% approval.

The Time Magazine poll would have put Nader well above this.

Nader was (arguably) right when he said Gore was the spoiler.

Forest