[EM] Approval vs ??

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Much of the criticism of Approval is done in a vacuum. I always want to 
reply:

"...So then, Approval is worse than....what?"

IRV?

James cited Mutual Majority (MMC) as Approval's failing. But the mutual 
majority situations where MMC applies are situations where IRV demonstrates 
its failure of WDSC & FBC, two criteria that Approval and CR pass.

Sure, when there's a mutual majority, the members of that mutual majority 
benefit from it in IRV. But, for a particular example, are we interested in 
how well off the most fortunate voters are, or aren't we more interested in 
how bad a strategy problem some voters can have? The fact that IRV, when 
there's a mutual majorilty, makes some voters better off, and some worse 
off, than they'd be in Approval, doesn't mean that IRV is better than 
Approval.

Some argue that the voters who aren't in that mutual majority have nothing 
to complain about if their candidate can't win. Of course, but they have 
strategic incentive to bury their favorite. Because their candidate can't 
possibly win, their best strategy will often be to bury their favorite by 
insincerely voting one of the mutual majority candidates to 1st place, to 
avoid the election of a worse one.

The problem with that, of course, is that we don't have perfect information. 
Sometimes people will mistakenly bury their favorite, believing that it's a 
situation like that described in the previous paragraph. And isn't that the 
old problem of Plurality? Isn't that what we want to get away from, with new 
voting systems?

With Approval, no one ever has any incentive to bury their favorite by 
voting someone else over him/her.

Then is Condorcet better than Approval? I prefer Condorcet to Approval. But 
now you're holding Approval up to an unreasonably hilgh standard. What do 
you want from the simplest, most easily proposed, most easily-implemented 
better voting system? It's unrealistic and unfair to demand that Approval be 
as good as Condorcet.

I prefer Condorcet to Approval because Condorcet receives and counts all of 
the pairwise preferences that anyone wants to vote. That's why Condorcet is 
better at electing the CW, and meets SFC, GSFC & SDSC. And it's why 
Condorcet does better at SU (Though Approval also does very well at SU, 
significantly better than IRV).

Approval has its particular advantages though. By its limiting of the voting 
of preferences, Approval lets the voter make a statement that a ranking of 
all the candidates doesn't make. Some candidates are good enough to vote 
for, and every Approval voter is making a strong and unmistakable statement 
about the difference between the ones s/he votes for or doesn't vote for. Of 
course you could make a similar statement by refusing to rank some 
candidates in Condorcet. But it's easy to rank a candidate in Condorcet, it 
doesn't make a very strong statement about someone's merit, that you include 
him/her in your ranking. Approval makes stronger statements. Though 
Condorcet allows better expression in one sense, then, there's also a sense 
in which Approval allows, and requiers,  stronger expression.

Though Condorcet better maximizes SU, Approval has its own social 
optimization: It's been shown that, when people vote strategically in 
Approval (and Approval very much encourages strategic voting), Approval 
maximizes the number of voters who are pleasantly surprised by the outcome. 
The number of votrers for whom the result is better than what they expected 
from the election. I'm not saying that that's better than SU maximization, 
only that Approval still has a social optimization.

Approval isn't Condorcet, and it isn't a fair comparison. But Approval is a 
strong 2nd. And Approval is remarkably good for such a simple method, such a 
minimal change from Plurality, such an easily proposed and implemented 
method.

Mike Ossipoff

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