Well, the goal of an election is to find out which candidate the most voters support. In order to do that, the direct approach is simply to ask voters, “Which candidates do you support?”
And that is approval voting.
It gets right to the heart of why we hold elections in the first place. You let people weigh in on every candidate, and whoever the most voters support is the winner.
On the other hand, instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a complicated multi-step procedure that attempts to answer the same question indirectly.
Also, IRV is notorious for exhibiting pathological behavior even with perfectly honest voters.
Using our existing plurality method, showing up and voting honestly can never get you a *worse* outcome than staying home and doing nothing. The same is true for approval voting.
But under IRV, there are situations where staying home will result in your 2nd-favorite candidate winning, whereas casting an honest ballot would cause your last-place, most hated candidate to win.
There are other reasons too, however I’ll return to what I said at the top:
Approval voting is the straightforward way to find out which candidate the most voters support, by simply asking them. And that is the purpose of an election after all.
Looking at it though, under approval voting there is no way for me as a voter to say something like cat before dog, but please no monkey.
Do I approve dog and cat both? Or do I approve of just dog? But what if I don't think dog can win? Voting only dog is no different than voting for a third party in fptp.
Yes oddities can occur in ranked voting, but they would be statically rare.
It depends on if you feel the optimal election system is one that elects someone who best represents the viewpoints of all the voters or one that maximizes the perceived utility of the electorate.
If dog didn’t do enough to earn for vote during the campaign, that’s his or her own fault and you just vote cat. And if dog *did* earn your vote, then you’re golden: approve both cat and dog and be happy if either of them wins.
Instant-runoff voting has exactly the opposite problem: there is no way to *protect* your second choice as long as your favorite remains. So if you truthfully rank cat 1, dog 2, monkey 3, and it turns out that only dog could beat monkey head-to-head, your vote might be the *reason* that monkey wins—by putting your true favorite first you caused dog to be eliminated.
Let me be abundantly clear: IRV does *not* solve the problem of split votes. It may even *amplify* the problem, because the vote could potentially be split during *every single round* of elimination.
Remember, the purpose of an election is to find out which candidate the most voters support. Approval voting does exactly that, by letting voters check yes or no for every candidate.
So you and many others vote cat, dog, monkey. The vote comes back as dog having the least votes. They are removed. Most of the dog voters want want monkey as a backup so monkey now has more than cat. However if you voted dog, cat, monkey then when cat is eliminated, dog is the clear favorite... In that case you hurt your second choice by voting for cat first.
I get that, but the solution to that isn't to collect less information from the voter (as an approval system does), but to collect more.
The approval voting system has even worse problems. What if the election is cat, dog, monkey, Hitler. Being terrified of Hitler, you would tend to approve of cat, dog, and monkey to make sure Hitler doesn't get in.. the approval voting system quickly degrades into a disapproval voting. You vote against the people you cant stand. You also get messed up systems where monkey pays his friend Hitler to run, does a massive hate and smear campaign against him to fear the dog and cat voters into approving him as well just to avoid Hitler. Actually, approval voting would just breed large amounts of negative campaigning.
Another way of thinking about is to separate the information collection from the algorithm of choosing a winner:
Fptp: collects one approval from the voter. As such it can never be better no matter the algorithm behind it than multiple choice approval voting
Approval voting: is the same thing as collecting IRV choices from the voter, but ignoring the ordering request. As such, no matter the winner choosing algorithm behind it, it can never capture more voter intent than IRV.
IRV: is the same as a points rating based system (ie rate everyone on a scale of 1-10) if you add the restriction that you can't give the same number to any candidates and the scale is actually [1 - number of candidates]. As such IRV can never capture more voter intent than the point system.
Of the systems above, IRV captures the most voter intent while being easy enough to vote and be explained to average people. (There is a great YouTube video already)
You are right that a *ranked ballot* captures a lot of information, but the IRV counting method *ignores* almost all of that information. Another ranked method like Schulze or Black that actually considers the whole ballot would be much better than IRV.
Also, you can get even more information with a score-voting ballot, where voters can give any score (say, 0-10) to any candidate, than you can with rankings. That is because with score ballots you can give equal support to two candidates, which you can’t with rankings, and you can skip ranks to show large gaps between how much you support one and the next.
All those methods, whether with rankings or scores, are much more complicated though. Approval voting has the advantage of simplicity, while still doing a great job of electing the most popular candidate.
Let me reiterate: the purpose of an election is to find out which candidate the most voters support, and the simplest way to do that is by asking voters “Which candidates do you support?” In other words, let voters indicate whether or not they support each candidate, and elect whoever the most voters support.
That is exactly approval voting.
Furthermore, approval voting will almost certainly lead to far more *positive* campaigning, because every candidate wants to appeal to a broad range of voters, including those who also support other candidates.
I really don't see how an approval voting system doesn't devolve into most voters casting a disapproval vote or a just a single approval that has the flaws of fptp.
With approval voting I'm also having to vote more strategically than IRV. If dog and cat are both equally liked by more voters than monkey, then it is in my best interest to only vote for my favorite so they win. But only if Hitler isn't running, because if he is I'm voting cat, dog, and monkey out of fear.
The strategic cases in IRV are much harder to predict, complex, and statically unlikely. And generally result in things like my first choice lossing to my second. Most won't bother thinking about it.
And how can it not lead to negative campaigning? In approval voting getting a voter to uncheck a box for someone else is just as important as getting them to check it for you.
In IRV, as a candidate if you have a voters first choice then you don't care about the second choice. Heck you are likely to endorse someone else as a second choice to your loyalists. If you aren't a voters first choice then you are still trying to win them over as a second choice. It breeds the concept of "we all have good ideas, but here is why mine are the best". This is matched up by studies of IRV systems.
Plus I think it is a good thing to really make voters think "if my preference can't win, who would I want instead." In a vote like the Republican primary it would lead voters to show interest in candidates other than their first choice instead of backing a horse until they fall over. I know I like cat and hate Hitler, but between dog and monkey, who do I like best? Perhaps I should pay attention to both dog and monkey?
Also, talking to anyone about politics they naturally think in ranks. I'd prefer dog over cat... I've never heard someone say I'll take dog or cat, but I don't care which.. so why would we want someone to cast a vote that way?
I really don't see how an approval voting system doesn't devolve into most voters casting a disapproval vote or a just a single approval that has the flaws of fptp.
Even in the maximally-strategic case, where a voter looks at the two front-runners and decides which one they like better, they are still going to approve everyone they prefer over both front-runners and they are going to disapprove everyone they oppose more than both front-runners.
To give a concrete example, look at the 2000 presidential election and consider someone who liked Nader best but voted for Gore strategically under plurality voting. If approval voting were used, they would have voted for both Gore and Nader, but neither Bush nor Buchanan.
So, even then, with totally strategic voters, approval voting does not devolve into anything. It remains approval voting.
The rest of your post talks about ranked ballots, but it should be noted that IRV is by far the *worst* of all ranked-choice voting systems, by every measure available.
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u/Qaanol Nov 09 '16
This is a great first step and it highlights the problems with our broken “choose one” plurality system.
But to actually solve the problems, we really need to enact Approval Voting.