[EM] News wanted about Maine's election.

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

On 11/10/2018 4:23 PM, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
> 	12018-11-09T21:59:37, "Sennet Williams" <sennetwilliams at yahoo.com>:
>
>> 	about approval voting:? ?IRV voters obviously get only one vote each,? I suppose we will find it how the court treats approval.
> 	"1 Person, 1 vote” means equal voting strength.  Approval gives each voter 1 vote per candidate.  That is fine.  What would be illegal would be giving some people more voting power, such as giving reach people up to a zillion votes per candidate.
Giving people N votes is still one-person one-vote, it's called Score 
Voting. You could call it fractional votes.

The argument for IRV is that, though people may cast more than one vote, 
only one vote at a time is counted. However, with Approval, if we count 
the votes like IRV, and the counting comes down to the last two 
candidates, either

1. The voter has voted for neither. Moot. However, under Robert's Rules, 
this could count for consideration of whether or not a winner obtained a 
majority. Robert's Rules, in their preferential voting counting rules 
that FairVote touts as supporting "IRV," an "exhausted ballot" still 
counts for the purposes of determining a majority, and RR requires the 
election be repeated (with new nominations!) if no candidate is approved 
by a majority. By the way, in real repeated elections, i.e., top two 
runoff, each voter gets two votes. Nobody ever complained that this 
violated one-person, one-vote.

2. The voter has voted for one and not the other. The additional vote is 
moot. But the voter did get to express approval of that candidate, which 
can make a difference in later politics.

3. The voter has voted for both. The votes do not determine the winner, 
but, gain, might matter if the winner must have a majority.

The idea that approval violates "one person, one vote" is one of those 
stupid, knee-jerk ideas, fairly common, based on abuse of the meaning of 
words, and the intentions behind them.
>