[EM] Fwd: 2008 election fiasco is preventable

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:12 PM 7/13/2007, Kathy Dopp wrote:

>Excuse me if you've already seen this one.  Would something this simple work?
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>1. 2008 election fiasco is preventable
>     Posted by: "Jan Kok" 
> <mailto:jan.kok.5y at gmail.com>jan.kok.5y at gmail.com jankok5
>     Date: Thu Jul 12, 2007 5:49 am ((PDT))

Yes. This is our very own Jan Kok, describing the core of 
implementing Approval Voting. Simply counting all the votes 
eliminates the first-level "spoiler effect."

If you look at the history of overvoting rules, at least as far as 
I've been able to find, there was an assumption that overvotes were 
errors, and if they were errors, then it being impossible to 
determine which vote was the intended one, they were thrown out.

But allowing voters to vote freely makes it possible for voters to 
vote for a third party candidate *and* for a major party candidate, 
thus not spoiling the major election.

Yes, it does not solve all problems. But Approval Voting is a very 
good system, one of the best. Higher resolution Range is better. In 
the other direction, Condorcet methods are arguably better in some 
ways. Approval is *clearly* better than so-called Instant Runoff 
Voting, and it is a whole lot simpler to implement.

There is no violation of the one-person, one-vote principle, since 
only one vote *at most* actually counts in the end. However, it is no 
longer possible to assume that there is an error if the vote totals 
exceed the number of voters. But that is a very simple-minded measure 
anyway, and it is easily bypassed by reporting full voting patterns.

In any case, once we have public ballot imaging, which I predict will 
happen in some places in 2008, we will have far better means of 
detecting counting fraud anyway.