[EM] Never propose Approval balloting

[Michael Ossipoff]

Instead of Approval balloting that says to vote for as many as you want to, 
say, instead:

The -1,1 method:

Each voter may give to any candidate -1 points or 1 point. The candidate 
with the highest vote total wins.

[end of -1,1 definiltion]

Then you emphasize something that people miss: You're voting on every 
candidate: You're giving a negative to some and a positive to others. That's 
true even in the usual Approval balloting, but people don't perceive it 
unless it's explicit, as in the -1,1 definition.

Maybe -1,0,1 is better still, because it's even farther from the risk of 
being misunderstood like Approval.

People will like giving negative point assignments, and will like -1,1 
better than standardly-presented Approval for that reason too.

That's another advantage of -1,0,1   The option to give 0 points makes a -1 
a much stronger statement. With -1,1, every candidate gets an extreme point 
assignment, because that's all there is. But with -1,0,1 giving the extreme 
-1 means more, message wise and count-result wise.

Three rating levels is the minimum number that give full power and meaning 
to extreme point ratings.

Maybe the very simple -1,0,1 is the most winnable of the good public 
proposals. Or maybe -1,1 would have a good chance too, avoiding the 
misunderstanding that besets Approval.

Another big advantage of a point rating method (known as Cardinal Ratings 
(CR) ) over a rank method is that there's only one way people expect to 
count ratings (add them up). But there are obviously infinitely many ways to 
count rankings, and they all have their advocates and plausibility. So 
there's the question "Why this rank count instead of that one?"

But SSD is my favorite, though MPOA (aka MDDA), -1,0,1  and maybe -1,1 are 
probably more winnable.

Mike Ossipoff