[EM] Inclusion Voting - true approval

[Tom Ruen]

With the up coming U.S. Presidential debates, I was reminded of my original attraction to Approval Voting. Specifically the issue of Nader being excluded from the debates in 2000 because he didn't poll at 15% support needed to qualify.

At the time it was obvious that the polls were asking the wrong question. If you ask people "If the election was held today, who would you support for president?" that's a fine question for determining who will might win the coming election, but it is not a useful question if used to determine inclusion of a debate.

Inclusion for a debate in inherently an approval question, "Who would you like to see in the debate?" The answer for an individual is a simple list of candidates that potentially may gain their eventual single vote. AND the debate-inclusion polling result also should be a list of candidate that people want to hear from, with a minimum threshold needed for inclusion for the list.

This to me is a true approval poll because there's a variable number of winners and offering a second opinion doesn't hurt my vote for my first preference.

What is usually called "Approval Voting" where a single (or fixed) number of winners are allowed can't really be considered "true approval" since voters may still be afraid to offer their true opinion of more than one favored candidate.

Inclusion Voting: Question given on the lines of "Which candidates would you like to have included?"
1. Voters can vote for as many candidates as they like.
2. Winners are candidates whose vote totals exceed X%.

Traditional EM discussion focuses on elections with a fixed number of winners, so perhaps this is opening up a completely new category of election methods.

Back to the Presidential debates, it would seem this approach would work well. A first debate might have an approval level as low as 5-10%, and allow limited exposure of a largest set of candidates. Then in subsequent debates, the threshold of inclusion can be raised as high as 25-30% perhaps.

I expect there's some room for manipulation in this process. Specifically you might imagine the Democrats delaying their endorsement and running a dozen mutually supportive candidates whose combined goal is to attack the republican incumbent. Then the Republicans might do the same, and run a dozen other candidates who all expect to drop out in deference to the incumbent, but run merely to make the incumbent look good. Even if you demand each party must only run one candidate in the debate, it can have the same effect with special interest parties (No-New-Taxes Party, Antinuke Party) mostly beholden to a major party in reality. These possible issues don't make an approval vote less valuable - it's still up to the people to decide who they really want to hear from.

The hard part in any case is how you convinced a candidate who believes he is popular to debate candidates with a much lower popularity - afterall they've little to win, and much to lose in such publicity. Still, I don't think I'd mind if the first debate (5% approval) had 10 candidates and Kerry and Bush didn't show until later debates, and then we voters could judge the competition and hear issues the top-two refuse to discuss.

Tom Ruen
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