[EM] Yes/?/No

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 02/11/2020 16.32, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 11/02/2020 5:00 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>>
>>  
>> On 01/11/2020 02.34, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 10/31/2020 9:03 PM Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Approval is one of the easiest election methods to explain and to
>>>> understand; the ballots are identical to traditional FPP ballots except
>>>> the instructions now say to mark the names of all of the candidates that
>>>> you like instead of only one of them. As before the winner is the
>>>> candidate with the greatest number of likes.
>>>>
>>>> But what about the candidates that you just like a little bit? Do
>>>> you include them or not? Where do you draw the line between like and not like?
>>>>
>>>
>>> i've been trying for a couple years to get the Election Science
>>> people to answer that simple question.  should a voter approve of their second
>>> choice or not?  there is no simple answer and the voter is burdened with
>>> the task of tactical voting.
>>
>> The simple answer is that any ranked method has to decide the answer to
>> some pretty tough elections. (Burlington being one of them.) Approval
>> abdicates the responsibility to get them right, and places it on the
>> voters instead.
> 
> that's not an answer (simple or not) to my question.  the question
> is simply this: in Fargo North Dakota (which, BTW, is 30 km from where i
> grew up in the '50s, '60s, and '70s) where they have adopted Approval
> Voting (as best as i can tell, it's the only U.S. jurisdiction to do
> so), in an election with 3 or more candidates, should the voter Approve
> their second-preferred candidate?

True. I should have been more clear: it is not an answer to your
question of when to approve, but it answers why it is the case that
"there is no simple answer and the voter is burdened with the task of
tactical voting".