[EM] Some answers to "1-person-1-vote"

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 07:02 PM 11/8/2005, Paul Kislanko wrote:
>But defend the statement "only one of your
>votes affects the outcome". I only MADE one vote in which I approved a
>subset of the available alternatives. To say that each of the approvals I
>made was a different "vote" is to admit that the "1P1V" argument is correct.
>It is much better (and much more likely to pass the 1P1V constitutionality
>requirement) to say that an approval ballot is voting for ONE proper subset
>of the available alternatives.

It's a semantic issue. But I *have* seen the objection made to 
Approval Voting by an IRV advocate that it allegedly violated the 
one-person, one-vote rule. Of course, it that argument were true, so would IRV.

What Mr. Ossipoff said is true: if one votes approval, analysis of 
the results will show that only one vote, in a single winner 
election, *at most*, affects the outcome, and by one vote I mean one 
mark on the ballot. Essentially, only a vote for the winner is 
effective, and all other votes are moot; that is, they could be 
deleted with no effect on the outcome.

The other way of showing that Approval remains one-person, one-vote 
is to consider the election pairwise; and the voter, if the voter 
does cast a vote for both members of a pair, is simply abstaining 
from that pairwise election, so it is far from an *extra* vote.

Comparing Approval with standard plurality, no overvoting, Approval 
simply allows the voter to vote in more pairwise election than 
no-overvoting will allow, though at the cost of abstaining from 
certain pairwise elections.

I've argued for a limited-rank version of Approval, which adds one 
rank to the mix: in addition to Approved and Not Approved, there is 
also Favorite.

Favorite is also Approved, but one is not abstaining from the 
pairwise election between a Favorite and an Approved, thus meeting 
the principal objection to Approval, its inability to specify a 
favorite. I've seen this kind of ballot described as
I prefer ....
I also approve of ....

A true violation of 1p1v (hey, it *is* easier to type) would be a 
scheme where deletion of one of the "extra" votes *could* affect the 
outcome. Cumulative Voting allows more than one vote per person, but 
typically it is really one-share, one-vote.

The true purpose of 1p1v is that all voters have equal rights. 
Approval Voting is really just another form of alternative voting, 
same as IRV. But simpler and better....