[Election-Methods] Improved Approval Runoff

[Dave Ketchum]

On most elections many, if not most, voters' preference will be a single 
candidate.  Why is this something to fight?
      One candidate can overshadow the competition.
      Voters can be loyal to their party.

For occasional exception elections there will be more interest in voting 
for multiple candidates, and it is DESIRABLE to support this voting for 
whichever elections may inspire voter interest in such.

Fighting complications that make the rules for deciding on winners hard to 
understand make such complications undesirable unless they provide major 
benefits.

DWK

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:00:59 -0300 Diego Renato wrote:
> All one-round voting systems that allows ballot truncation are 
> vulnerable to bullet voting, resulting the same results of plurality 
> voting. For instance, suppose that some voter has A as his/her first 
> preference. S/he can vote like this:
> 
> Approval: A: approved; B: rejected; C: rejected; D: rejected ...
> Range (0 - 100 scale): A: 100; B: 0; C: 0; D: 0 ...
> Preferential (IRV, Condorcet, etc): A>B=C=D=...
> 
> Additionally, there are several instances which only binary input voting 
> systems are reasonable. Complex systems are hard to adopt in 
> low-educated underdeveloped countries.
> 
> This system, called Improved Approval Runoff (IAR), has the goal to 
> resist bullet voting through simple ballots.
> 
> Description:
> 
> 1) On the first round, the voter can vote for as many or as few 
> candidates as desired.
> 2) If some candidate has more than 50% of approvals, the most approved 
> is elected.
> 3) If not, that candidate runs a second round against other candidate - 
> the most approved after a new count which the votes for the first one 
> are reweighted to 1/2.
> 4) The winner is the candidate who receives a majority of votes on the 
> second round.
> 
> On computer simulations, the top-two approval runoff method selected 
> more times the Condorcet winner than any Condorcet method. I think that 
> IAR is slightly fairer than top-two approval runoff under real voters.
> 
> Any comments?
>  
> ________________________________
> Diego Santos
-- 
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  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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