Marketing Approval Voting as "Disapproval" Voting to Forestall the Charge of Non-OPOV
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I live in Virginia. We are going through a race for Governor, with three candidates. Voting early was permitted, but election day is coming up. At each polling place, there is reliably a table of people from the Republican party and another from the DINO party. This presents an opportunity to evangelize about voting-system reform (or revolution as I think of it) toward people who may be interested but probably either haven't heard of the idea or have only heard about "RCV." At an early-voting place, I talked to a DINO volunteer, and he let on that he wasn't wholly satisfied with the party. I think that with his mindset, he was open to the idea of political means of defeating two-party dominance (2PD). However, in the time that I had while he listened to me, I did not succeed to convince him that Approval Voting conforms to "One Person, One Vote" (OPOV).
So, I'm thinking, maybe the thing to do is not to start out by describing Approval Voting as it is described where implemented. I'm thinking, instead, to market it as Disapproval Voting. This would be the first voting system to describe to people one is trying to convince.
In Disapproval Voting, the candidates are listed on the ballot and the voter is permitted to write the arithmetic expression "-1" by the names of so many of the candidates as the voter chooses. No other marks are permitted. In the tally, each such mark is treated as a "disapproval". The candidate who receives the fewest marks of disapproval wins.
This should forestall the charge that the system does not conform to OPOV.
I was thinking of maybe drafting and printing a screed to hand to the volunteers who will be out there to represent the DINO party of Va. I think to drive around to as many polling places as I can on that day to hand them out.
Come to think of it, maybe there's a slightly different message that could reach some of the Republican volunteers. It could begin with "Some Republicans say that the tallying of the 2020 election was not on the up-and-up. I think it very likely conformed to the statutes, but there's a Supreme Court decision that I think it did not conform to, and that's Wesberry vs. Sanders." I could go on about that, then get around to how Disapproval Voting would make the elections for the electors legitimate. I would include an e-mail address for discussion.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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@jack-waugh I've always thought Approval ballots should have explicit "Disapprove" boxes alongside the "Approve" boxes, so voters perceive everyone as getting one vote per candidate. (It would also make it harder to tamper with the ballots by adding marks that weren't put there by the voter.)
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Your ballot is your one vote.
Also, you can't give multiple votes to any one candidate.
The real explanation is the Equality Criterion, but that's not an easy pitch without an example or a visual aid to explain vote splitting and the spoiler effect. -
I don't really see why disapproval makes it look more like one person one vote.
Anyway, if people think approval voting is allowing "more than one vote", you can ask what if you just gave a score to every candidate? Is that OK? And what if that score happens to be out of 1?
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@toby-pereira, there are a couple of reasons to want to be able to plant, under conditions of severely limited time for conversation, the idea that voting can be improved.
There isn't time for an exchange, where you propose Approval Voting, the unsophisticated listener says that allows some people more votes, and then you explain Score Voting and ask what is wrong with that, and then the other person accepts that Score would conform to OPOV, and then you prove that in terms of the power relations created among voters, Approval is equiv Score{0, 1} and therefore also conforms to OPOV.
Say I start out by proposing Disapproval Voting as a means of escape from entrenched power. I believe that Americans, by and large, hate politicians. My listener may be so enamored of the idea of being able to express disapproval for a wide swath of candidates that it might not occur to him (or her) to think that the system fails OPOV.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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@jack-waugh You can also draw parallels to referendums or judge elections where you can vote for or against each item, or abstain.
