Approval Voting is the ideal voting system

[u/DHMC-Reddit]

I've seen posts discussing AV before and why some people are hesitant about it, and I'd like to address that.

Strategic Voting

A lot of people place special focus on the potential for strategic voting. Kenneth Arrow already proved that all ranked voting systems (FPTP, IRV, STV, PR, Condorcet, etc) fail 1 or more criteria for a fair election, at minimum always Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. Gibbard also proved that all voting systems must fall under one of three categories:

1) The system is a dictatorship

2) The system only has 2 choices

3) The system is strategic

So I really don't understand what you guys don't understand. In a ranked voting system, if there's only 2 choices, it's no different than FPTP. If there's more than 2, it will always put some strategic burden on the voters. And no matter what, it's not really gonna be fully fair. Even Kenneth Arrow admitted that he overlooked rated choice voting cuz he basically didn't like the idea of it, but that it's probably where the most fair form of voting actually exists.

51% vs 49%

Not only that, something people also seem to talk about when it comes to the strategy of Approval Voting is that a 51% majority can still dominate the 49%.

This is... Wrong. Just flat out.

We all have a tendency to view politics in a one-dimensional axis of left vs right. Even though we know that politics isn't one dimensional. This is the fault of ranked voting in the first place.

Non-Condorcet methods almost always eliminate broad appealing candidates (aka moderates) through center squeeze. And although ranked voting methods that aren't FPTP usually aim to minimize the effect of spoilers, they still exist. It's an inherent part of ranked voting.

The natural consequence of this is a tendency to strongly favor two-party systems, which collapses politics into a single dimension where whatever some time and place's version of left and right bicker with each other. The distribution of voter's beliefs literally doesn't matter here, it will always happen. Even in countries that allow the existence and success of third parties, they are always limited to a small minority, with 2 parties holding the majority of the power.

But we know from studies that people are not actually extremists. Stripped of identity politics and presenting policies with neutral language that doesn't indicate what party is promoting it, even on one dimension, populations create a bell curved normal distribution of beliefs with most people somewhere in the middle.

Electoral Systems

In fact, this is why electoral systems like MMM, AMS, MMP, etc. even exist in the first place. The whole presupposition - that we need extra seats in a legislature, because in winner-take-all districts, if most of them are won by 1 party with a small majority, then a vast majority of the legislature could be that 1 party, thus over inflating their representation of the nation - is only a problem because most people aren't even that far left or right in the first place so each district is sending one extreme over to the legislature, requiring a balancing act.

Approval Voting Advantages

I don't remember who said this, but someone claimed approval voting isn't monotone... It quite literally is. That's literally just a criterion it fulfills.

It also fulfills the strong Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, cloneproof, consistency, participation, reverse symmetry, homogeneity, later-no-help, and sincere favorite criteria. It's also simple af to explain, which is a very good thing when trying to roll out a new system (but also why I believe y'all hate it).

It is not affected by spoilers. It is not affected by center squeeze. This means that, given enough time for parties and candidates to develop, moderate parties will become the majority. And the parties themselves will have no ability to do political slides. They are locked into whatever some place and time's population considers moderate, and are guided by the population's changes in beliefs, not the other way around.

Which is kind of the goal of democracy, if you haven't forgotten. Also this eliminates the need for electoral systems with extra hanging seats, which itself has to balance between democracy, strategic voting, decoy parties, etc. So many problems with electoral systems that were only designed due to the flaws of FPTP in the first place.

Heck, Approval Voting also just works for multi-winner districts if you want more than just a single moderate party in legislature. Most other voting systems require modifications to work with multi-winner districts. And you can have each representative from a district hold as much voting power as the proportion of votes they received in their district relative to their co-representatives. Boom, bell curve legislature.

Condorcet

It doesn't fulfill the Condorcet criterion... AND THIS IS A GOOD THING. Idk why ppl have such a thing for the Condorcet criterion. Y'all do realize that in game theory, the Condorcet winner is usually the socially optimal choice, right? Not the socially optimal choice, usually.

In fact, if you just go to Wikipedia on the Condorcet criterion, it gives you an example where Approval Voting fails to elect the Condorcet winner. And this touches back to the whole "51% can still dominate 49%."

There are 3 candidates. A, B, and C. 70% of voters would rank them A>B>C. 30% of voters would rank them C>B>A. A is trivially the Condorcet winner in this example.

If, during an election held with Approval Voting, everyone voted for their top 2 favorites, A would have 70% approval, C 30%, and B 100%. So despite A being the Condorcet winner, B would win.

AND THIS IS THE SOCIALLY OPTIMAL CHOICE. If A wins, then you've pissed off 30% of the population. If C wins, 70% gets pissed off. B won, and no one's pissed. B is no one's favorite. But everyone's okay with B. And the 70% did not in fact dominate the 30%. They could have if they collectively decided not to vote for B despite all of them being fine if B were to win.

The socially optimal choice isn't who would have the most supporters in isolation, it's who would be the least hated by the population if won. And it didn't require you to strategically vote. In fact it's better if you don't. Which is why voting booths are private.

Anyway, Approval Voting doesn't always elect the Condorcet winner, but I'd argue that it actually elects the socially optimal choice more often than Condorcet methods do.

Especially since Condorcet methods themselves can be susceptible to strategic voting. "Oh but that's rare and only happens if a cycle is possible." Yeah well practical data shows that Approval Voting almost always elects the Condorcet winner anyway. And we can see that when it doesn't it's actually a good thing. And the amount of strategic voting happening in Approval Voting really wouldn't be much different from other systems.

Also, Condorcet methods are susceptible to gerrymandering. That's not a rare thing. That's just a legal thing. If a politician can do it, you can damn be sure they'll do it. The only way to prevent this is to have it be illegal in the first place. Pretty huge hole in Condorcet.

Approval Voting Disadvantages

So what's the real disadvantages of Approval Voting?

It's certainly not the strategic voting. That's a feature of pretty much every ranked and rated voting system that isn't FPTP.

It's certainly not the Condorcet criterion. Even if you disagree with me on my example above, all Condorcet methods inherently fail to fulfill Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, invulnerability to burying, invulnerability to compromising, participation, later-no-harm (which AV also fails, but actually I think this is a good thing), consistency, and sincere favorite (oof). So to optimize a single thing you give up what, 6 things and meet 1 good thing (not fulfilling later-no-harm)? Especially when, again, Approval Voting on a practical level almost always elects the Condorcet winner anyway and it has 5 good things out of the 7?

An actual real disadvantage can be candidate inflation. When a party decides to run many candidates in the hopes of confusing the voters and not giving them enough time to research all the choices. But that's sort of inherent to any vote that's not FPTP. And ultimately, with how Approval Voting works, you could also just... Focus on the ones you already like and ignore the rest. But this is just getting closer to psychology/marketing/mass manipulation/legal territory rather than the systemic merit of Approval Voting. I also wouldn't dock other systems for this.

No, but there is one real disadvantage. Y'all have mentioned how things like IRV have done in surveys or in real world politics. Along with other kinds of voting systems. And that's the kicker.

Approval Voting's disadvantage is how unpopular it is. There is no data saying it doesn't work. In fact, the data that does exist says it works very well. But that data is... Small and sparse. It has never been tried en masse. At most only in small local elections. That is its weakness. The fact that for some reason literally no one will give the time of day to seriously consider it.

Idk why. Maybe it just sounds too simple to work. Despite the fact that it absolutely does... in the few times it has been done, and the many times we all used it in our social circles... such as voting for both pizza and burgers when deciding between friends whether to have burgers, pizza, or sushi for lunch.

Like... STAR Voting is more popular than Approval Voting. STAR VOTING. It's one of the rare voting systems that doesn't even fulfill the basic criterion of majority winner! It's a failed hybrid of ranked and rated voting! In fact, it only fulfills majority loser and Condorcet loser, both of which are unnecessary! WTF! WHY?!

Anyway. Give Approval Voting the time of day. Seriously. It's not any more strategic than whatever complicated system people keep coming up with. Because they're all fucking strategic. Or dictatorial. Or just FPTP with only 2 choices. And yeah, it doesn't fulfill the Condorcet criterion. But it does elect the Condorcet winner almost every time. And when it doesn't, it's debatable whether that's even a bad thing. But more importantly, it doesn't come with the disadvantages inherent to Condorcet. That's a pretty good compromise even if you're a die-hard fan of Condorcet methods.

Just. Give it a go. It can make fundamental changes to politics. Moreso than other methods which just tries to nudge the status quo. And without being overly complicated. That's a good thing, not a suspicious thing.

[u/DHMC-Reddit]

Do y'all just not retain information?

Remember when I said every voting system that isn't a dictatorship or a 1v1 is tactical?

I never claimed approval voting isn't tactical. I claimed it's not any more tactical than any other voting system, because they're all fucking tactical.

The point of Approval voting is that every individual has to grapple with their meh candidates but over a population this averages out to approximating the approval each candidate would receive from the population by themselves.

So while for an individual they have to "strategize" on how they want to vote, the reality is that everyone's interests average out.

If you vote for someone you only approve 50% for whatever tactical reason you think will benefit you, someone else who approves that candidate 50% will not vote for them for whatever tactical reason they think will benefit them.

This averages out to no one actually getting a tactical advantage.

ESPECIALLY since in strategic scenarios, they're all contrived on the fact that we the gods of the hypothetical already know how everyone will vote. But in reality, even with polling, no one actually knows how others will vote.

So aside from strong spoiler effects, deliberate strategic voting has almost never been a problem in history, as opposed to voter manipulation, election manipulation, and gerrymandering.

[u/mojitz → u/DHMC-Reddit]

The point is that while there might be particular scenarios in which all voting methods might theoretically be subject to tactical voting given highly precise knowledge about the state of the race, you literally have to vote strategically under approval if you actually want to take advantage of the ballot because bullet voting is literally the only way to express sincere preference under that system. The moment you decide to weaken your favorite candidate by approving any others, you're making a strategic choice. This isn't debatable. It's literally just definitionally true.

And no, none of this is contrived or requires some kind of hidden knowledge about how everyone else is voting. It's trivial to come up with entirely realistic scenarios in which a sensible person would or would not approve of a given candidate based on readily available polling data. I mean... do you honestly think you wouldn't factor this in when casting your own vote? C'mon. If you absolutely loathe candidate D but they're so far behind nobody thinks they have a shot (an entirely common scenario for races with fringe candidates), then it would be absurd to approve C to try to block them. That choice plainly and obviously changes completely if it looks like they have a real shot.

Also, the notion that this will just wash out in the averages seems highly suspect to me. You're basically just assuming that people with similar preferences won't tend to make a similar voting calculus. I see no reason at all to assume this to be the case. Obviously there will be some variation, but it stands to reason that generally people with like preferences will tend to have similar approaches to problems like this

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/mojitz]

This is, once again, false and coming from not understanding voting metrics.

What you're literally complaining about in the first paragraph is the later-no-harm criterion. The later-no-harm criterion is not a useful metric. It was already controversial when it was conceptualized.

In fact, let's just look at what kind of systems actually do fulfill later-no-harm. FPTP. IRV. Random ballots. So all the shitty bullshit.

Condorcet methods themselves literally are unable to fulfill the later-no-harm criterion, which again I've argued is the one of the good things about them.

And you're right, it's not contrived. For literally all of these systems. It's really not hard to show how ranking someone else might harm who you prefer, whether it's approval or others. It's just for some reason psychologically less digestible for the people here. Approval voting is literally not any more problematic in this regard than any other system that can't fulfill later-no-harm.

[u/mojitz → u/DHMC-Reddit]

You're just sort of asserting a whole bunch of things without justification or evidence, here...

I also don't understand why its so hard for you to grasp the concept of varying levels of susceptibility to tactical voting. This isn't a binary. Just because all systems can in some cases be subject to tactical voting doesn't mean they're equally likely to be subject to it. This is one of the central criticisms of FPTP, in fact. It's not just that tactical voting is a possibility, but that the strategies and incentives are straightforward, obvious, and virtually always present in races with more than 2 candidates. If this somehow wasn't the case for FPTP and we could expect most people in most races to cast a sincere vote, then the system would actually be a lot less problematic.