[EM] Part 2, Approval vs Condorcet

[Toby Pereira]

 Arguably one problem with approval voting is that people might refuse to approve the "lesser evil" of the two main candidates because they see it as a vote for and an endorsement of them. Whereas with a ranked ballot, they simply rank the candidates in order and the notion of endorsement need not come into it. Under FPTP, people will often say they could not vote for x, even if it's between x and y, and they prefer x to y. This is likely to carry over into approval voting. Obviously under approval voting, the hope is that higher quality candidates will be in the running (as has been argued for Stein in this case), but this is not guaranteed to always happen.
Toby
    On Friday, 22 March 2024 at 06:43:17 GMT, Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Some pragmatics:
What would happen this November if we were using Approval?
There are lesser-evil hold-your-nose voters who are going to vote for Biden though they don’t like him, because they think they have to accept lesser-evil because (I guess?) they’ve been told that everyone else wants evil:-)
Those people would probably approve Biden, whether they really approve of him or not.
But they’d also approve Jill Stein, because they prefer her (though they now, with Plurality, mistakenly believe it unrealistic to vote for her).
Polls show something like 70% of Americans don’t want the Democrats or Republicans, & want different parties.
Polls show that the same % want a lot of policies that are the opposite of what the Republocratic party are imposing on them.
The policies that they say they want are the ones that the Greens offer. No I’m not electioneering. It isn’t possible to discuss voting without sometimes saying something like that. It’s necessary to speak of pragmatics, & that requires specifics.
My reason for saying that is to support my claim that those people who now are going to vote for Biden as lesser-evil, would, in Approval, also approve Jill Stein.
Just about everyone who approves Joe would approve Jill.
But many (including me) who approve Jill would never consider approving Joe !!!
Therefore Jill would beat Joe & Donald.——-Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium is at the voter-median. …& so Approval quickly homes in on the CW.
A Myerson-Weber equilibrium is an outcome that is consistent with, & therefore appears to confirm, the assumptions that led to that outcome.
——-
Advantages of Approval over ranks-methods:
Approval is the absolutely minimal voting-system that allows & counts free expression of acceptance or merit, & comparisons of it, among several or many candidates in a multicandidate election.
…& is therefore the unique completely unarbitrary method.
With any other method, people will ask, “But why *this* method among all the many others?”
Approval isn’t subject to that question, because there’s only one absolutely minimal method.
Approval is uniquely easy to define, explain, propose, enact, administer, & security-audit against count-fraud.
Those are a lot of big, & absolutely-necessary, advantages.
Let’s start with count-fraud:
If there are 20 candidates, Approval has 20 vote-totals to sum, keep track of, audit & send to Central-Count 
Condorcet has 380 pairwise votes to calculate, sum, keep track of, audit & send to Central-Count.
About 20 times more vote-totals.
Additionally, in Approval, it’s only necessary to increment a number when encountering a vote.
…while, in Condorcet, each pairwise vote must first be found by running a subroutine on a ranking.
So, overall, how many times more computation does Condorcet need?
A hundred times more? Several hundred times more?
How about a handcount audit?
For Condorcet ?  :-D
Now chance.
A spot-check?
It would have to be a much tinier spot, sample.
Did you know that, after both of Dubya’s elections, Harper’s Magazine reported mountains of evidence for big count-fraud?
Don’t ignore or discount count-fraud. Minimizing the chance of successful count-fraud is absolutely-essential.
This concludes pPart 2. 
Part 3 (of 3) will be along next.
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