[EM] Hybrid ranking/approval ballots

[C.Benham]

I'm attracted to a couple of Condorcet methods that allow voters to rank 
the candidates and also give an approval threshold.

I think an important question is what should be the default placement of 
this approval threshold.  I've read from one or two
people that all candidates "ranked in any position" should be considered 
approved, meaning that a ballot that strictly ranks
all the candidates by putting a number next to all of them should count 
as strategically useless approval for all the candidates
while a ballot that does the same thing by putting a number next to all 
but one of them counts as approving all but the unmarked
candidate.

I find that silly and unnecessarily unfair to naive or careless voters, 
so instead in the past I have gone with "voted above at least one 
candidate".

Since the approvals are only used to complete Condorcet it is likely 
that most of the time they'll have no effect and so many voters won't
bother giving an explicit approval cutoff.

In that circumstance with either the "voted above at least one 
candidate" or the "ranked in any position" rules, the outcome of the 
election
could be affected by the addition or removal of candidates that all (or 
nearly all) of the voters hate.

I find that also silly and unacceptable.  So now I am strongly of the 
view that default approval should be only of "voted below no other 
candidate".

Condorcet methods with no Push-over incentive should allow above-bottom 
ranking.

The ballot rules should allow voters to strictly rank however many 
candidates they like and also (if the method has some use for approval 
information)
to approve only one candidate or all but one or any number in between.

Hopefully this should all sound obvious. But several people here have 
been tolerant or (even supportive) of alternatives.

Someone who proposed a Condorcet completed by Approval method suggested 
that a 6-slot grading ballot would be fine and that we would arbitrarily
call the top 3 slots approval and the bottom 3 not.

If there are more than 4 candidates that isn't enough to allow the voter 
to strictly rank all the candidates and approve only one or all-but-one.

In principle a grading or multi-slot rating ballot with the top half of 
the slots/grades signifying approval is fine as long as there are at 
least as many
slots/grades as twice the number of candidates, minus one.

Another abomination is compulsory ranking. This is "GIGO" (garbage in, 
garbage out) and I find it analogous to compelled speech.

In Australia, the major parties'  "How-to-Vote" cards usually just 
advise their supporters to after writing a "1" next to their party's 
candidate just to
number all the rest according to the order they appear on the ballot paper.

Chris Benham