[EM] Jameson: Sure, I basically agree about conditional methods

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 12:01 PM 3/20/2012, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:



>Certainly ordinary Approval should be the first proposal. And if 
>options are not
>later added to it, and ordinary Approval remains the method in use, 
>that would be fine.

Well, not entirely "fine," but we don't need to go there at this 
point. Approval is simply Count All the Votes.

Years ago, I started calling this a "no-brainer."

If a voter wants to add multiple approvals, why not count them? I see 
no reason that survives examination, not in a deterministic election, 
non-ranked Approval.

There are issues when more than one candidate is being elected, I'm 
not going there at this point. Approval-at-Large isn't a great method 
... but still better than Plurality-at-Large.

The habit of vote-for-one came from deliberative process and standard 
elections under Robert's Rules, where a winner was required to gain a 
majority, and the election was *repeated* if nobody did. So the 
necessary compromise process took place outside the polling itself. 
Approval could make this more efficient, that's all (and, 
historically, approval was used this way for the election of popes, 
where a two-thirds majority was required to approve the election.)