Paul Cohen's "Balanced Approval Voting"
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Let's say I'm the voter. This system says I can leave a candidate unmarked, mark for approval, or mark for disapproval. I get this choice for each candidate named on the ballot, independently of how I choose for another candidate. The winner is the candidate whose count of approvals minus her count of disapprovals exceeds the same measure for each of the other candidates.
Cohen won't exclude the possibility of write-ins. If say the Nazi party is supporting Hitler as a write-in and I don't know about it, the system will coerce from me a middle score for Hitler, whereas in my opinion, he deserves the lowest score, and any write-in candidate I don't know about deserves the lowest score. Cohen won't allow me to mark disapproval for "all others". Since the system counts my ballot in a way different from how I want it to, I condemn the system.
His reply to the above, and my replies interspersed:
I'm not opposed to disallowing write-in candidates. But if you want to give an opposition vote to a write-in candidate that is your prerogative.
But the problem is that I don't necessarily know about the write-in candidate in order to know to give opposition. My demand is opposition to even candidates I don't know. Most other proposals allow that.
Do you know of any voting system that permits a voter to specify how votes are to be counted? It seems a pretty silly and unmanageable idea.
Not in full generality. However, many proposed systems allow a voter as much control over how the vote is counted as another voter would have. But your system would accord to Nazi voters their control over how their vote affects the score of Hitler as against the candidates whose names are listed on the ballot forms, whereas it would deny me my right to counter one of their votes, just because I don't know about them and their candidate. I don't know whether the STAR advocates contemplate write-ins, but in any event, they make clear that an unscored candidate receives the lowest score (and therefore also the lowest rank, as STAR derives rank from score for its last round of tallying).
If a write-in candidate is kept a secret from voters then that candidate has little chance of election. Conversely, if a write-in campaign is well advertised then a voter has every opportunity to vote against that candidate. Personally, I have no opposition to simply not allowing write-in candidates if others, like you, think it is an important issue. I don't find it an important feature at all.
OK, I guess that is a valid point. So, I endorse Balanced Approval Voting, since for practical purposes in large elections, it meets both the constraints that I think, taken together, suffice to erase the oligarchy