[EM] approval strategy

Kevin Venzke stepjak at yahoo.fr
Sun Jan 16 18:42:19 PST 2005


James,

 --- James Green-Armytage <jarmyta at antioch-college.edu> a écrit : 
> I'm trying to understand the argument in favor of approval voting, and so
> I need to know a bit more about approval strategy. Approval fans, does
> this sound like a good statement of approval strategy?:
> 
> "Approve your favorite candidate, plus anyone whom you like better than
> the frontrunner."

http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/sing.html
Go down to #7. (I notice these articles seem missing from electionmethods.org.)

You want to approve candidates who are better than your expectation for the
election. So if there are only two apparently viable candidates, given odds
50% each let's say, you want to approve all candidates who are better than
the average of those two candidates.

I don't find social utility arguments for Approval to be persuasive.
I wrote a simulation to come up with some statistics:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/13742

I like Approval because
1. It is easy to count
2. It is easy to understand
3. It satisfies the criterion that if a majority give some vote to X and
don't give any vote to Y, Y can't win. (I get this from
http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~seppley/ under "Minimal Defense," although
Steve Eppley's wording only allows Approval to satisfy the weaker "Non-Drastic
Defense." These are Mike Ossipoff's SDSC and WDSC. I prefer the wording I
used since it can be applied even when sincere preferences are unknown.)

I mention #3 because IRV doesn't satisfy this even when equality is allowed
in the rankings.

Of course, I have the same problems with Approval as everyone else.

Kevin Venzke



	

	
		
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