[Election-Methods] leaving seats open

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Oct 8, 2007, at 9:46 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> At 07:04 PM 10/8/2007, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
>>> Are we saying that a bullet vote for Abraham Lincoln is insincere?
>>> Why? The voter has essentially set an approval cutoff between
>>> Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. In this case, that isn't even
>>> questionable, it is quite sincere.
>>
>> Which is exactly what I meant by "unfortunate shorthand" above. Per
>> your premise, our voter as dictator would fill the seats which Mr
>> Lincoln and Mr Khan (or is it Mr Genghis?), assuming that both seats
>> had to be filled from the candidate list.
>
> Actually, no. As dictator, he would fill one seat and leave the  
> other vacant until he found a better candidate!
>
> This is one of the most offensive practices in actual elections,  
> the assumption that the office *must* be filled. Robert's Rules  
> dislikes that any action be taken without the support of a  
> majority, voting explicitly on the question. What is interesting  
> about Approval is that the winner clearly has that, the majority  
> has decided to support the winner, there isn't any doubt about  
> that. True, because of imperfect knowledge, the majority might  
> actually prefer another candidate, but ....

As a side note on this discussion, the Green Party of California (as  
well as GPUS, which adopted similar rules) uses an STV variation that  
allows for leaving seats empty. We use BC-like STV with an additional  
rule that, to be deemed elected, a candidate must receive a full  
(Droop) quota of votes. The underlying idea is to require some  
threshold level of affirmative voter support while preserving PR.

Voters truncate their ballots by ranking only candidates they  
approve. The operational definition of "approve candidate X" in this  
case is "prefer electing X to leaving seat open".


BTW, "dictator", like "sincere", is being used metaphorically in this  
discussion, at least by me.