[EM] Dave: Approval-objection answers

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Dave:

You wrote:

On Mar 22, 2012, at 4:09 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
 
> On 03/22/2012 07:57 PM, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:
>> There are plenty of voters who report having to "hold their nose" and
>> vote only for someone they don't like. They'd all like to be able to
>> vote for better candidates to, including their favorites. Even if one
>> only counts the Democrat voters who say that they're strategically  
>> forced
>> to vote only for someone they don't really like, amounts to a lot of
>> people who'd see the improvement brought by Approval.
 
If there is no one acceptable to vote for, the voters have not done  
their job:
.     Could happen occasionally such as failures in doing  
nominations.  Write-ins can help recover for this.

[endquote]

There could be elections in which there's no one acceptable to vote for, but, as you
said, even then, there should be write-ins.

But, even with the difficulty of getting non-big-2 parties on the ballot, and especially
after the way Approval will open things up, there will usually be someone reasonably
acceptable on the ballot. Even now, ballots often have a wide variety of candidates
and parties.

You continued:
 
"strategically forced" should not be doable for how a particular voter  
voted 

[endquote]

It's doable because many voters are so resigned and cowed that it doesn't
take much to force them to do giveaway compromise strategy, without any
reliable information to justify that strategy. I refer to the progressive people
who think they strategically need to vote for the Democrat.

You continued:

(but no one voted for the supposedly forced choice 

[endquote]

Regrettably, millions vote for that "choice", because it's billed as one of "the two choices".

You continued:

-  why force  
such a hated choice?  

[endquote]

To keep voters from voting for someone whom they genuinely prefer. What the public, 
including the voters, would like isn't the same as what is most profitable to those who
own the media that tell us about "the two choices". Everyone believes that only they
have the preferences that they have, because that's how it looks in the media. 

Notice that all politicians routinely promise change. That's because they know
that the public wants change. So the politicians are adamant about change. They're
mad as hell and they want to do something about it, and give us change. Amazingly, that 
pretense continues to reliably work, every time. 


You continued:
 
OMOV may inspire some - many of us have to argue against it having  
value because we back, as better, methods this thought argues about -  
such as Condorcet, Score, and even IRV.

[endquote]

OMOV is easily answered by pointing out that Approval let's everyone rate each
candidate as approved or unapproved.

You continued:

Part of the chicken dilemma difficulty is that it depends on what some  
voters will do without any compulsion, and what others will do after  
making promises to cooperate

[endquote]

The chicken dilemma is very difficult to get rid of. I don't know of anyone
proposing a FBC-complying method that really gets rid of that problem.

The methods that I call "defection-resistant" do much to alleviate that problem,
but don't eliminate it. They just push it to a secondary level, where defection strategy is more
complicated and counterintuitive, and therefore less likely to be used. 

A party whose members might defect by not support your party in Approval isn't likely
to engage in the Machiavellianly bizarre strategy of conditionally approving Democrats,
Republicans, Libertarians and Nazis in order to gain some mutual conditional approvals. Not
if ethical reputation counts for anything. 

I've said that methods that don't get rid of that problem don't significantly
improve on ordinary Approval. All that can be said for the defection-resistant methods
is that they might improve a little on Approval, in a way.

In other words, the improvement is questionable at best. And, for most methods trying
to improve on Approval, the improvement is outright illusory.

I'd say that Approval can't be improved on, other than questionably or doubtfully.

Mike Ossipoff

  		 	   		  
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