[EM] Approval reducing to Plurality

[Raph Frank]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> What is nice about approval is that even if each candidate is a
>> centrist, the "menu" can be different in each district.   You don't
>> just get the same 2-option menu in every district.
>
> What kind of election did you refer to? Did the districts maybe have
> separate elections or separate electors to be elected, or just different set
> of mind although the votes will be counted for the whole country?

Not a specific one.  I don't know of anywhere which elects a
legislature by approval or by condorcet.

However, the principle is that it allows candidates have more varied
combinations of policies.

Assuming there are 2 issues, the 2 main parties would have a view on
each of them.

Thus the voter might be able to choose between

R: Yes to both
D: No to both
T1: Yes to first, No to 2nd
T2: No to first, Yes to 2nd

Under plurality, a voter who wants the first policy but not the 2nd
has to decide if blocking the 2nd policy is more important than
passing the first one and then vote for R or D.

This gets even worse as there are more options added.

However, with approval/condorcet, the voter can vote for the 3rd party
candidate which has the mix of policies that they actually want.

The effect is that candidates can offer a different mix of options,
rather than just 2 options.