Approval Voting article in need of review

[GregW]

This article is intended for a general audience of voting citizens.
I request both constructive and destructive critic.
The Voter Strategy section is the most controversial.

Approval Voting for Single Winner Election
A Simple System That Works

With our current system, Plurality Voting, you vote for one candidate. Approval Voting lets you vote for one or more candidates. In almost all cases, this eliminates the Spoiler Effect, because you can vote for your preferred major party candidate and your favorite third-party or independent candidate.

The candidate who receives the most approvals wins. It is a simple change. All voting machines can handle approval ballots and we can tabulate the results at the precinct level.

An Approval Vote ballot is very similar to a Plurality Vote ballot.
Approval voting reduces spoiled ballots as most spoiled ballots are caused by indecisive voters making marks for two candidates, which is what an indecisive voter should do when Approval Voting.

Plurality and Approval ballots will go here, could not get the .jpg to show up.

Superior to Plurality Voting
No voting system is perfect, but the system we use in most elections, Plurality Voting, has severe problems.

Supporters of the status quo will condemn any system proposed to replace Plurality Voting, with nary a word about the defects of Plurality Voting.

Vote Splitting and Primary Elections
In a plurality election, candidates with similar platforms will split the votes of like-minded voters, allowing an unpopular candidate to win. Approval Voting prevents this by allowing voters to approve any number of candidates.

Strategic Campaigns

A strategic voting campaign would require accurate knowledge of voter intentions to create the strategy. Many voters would need to be organized. In an approval race, a miscalculation could easily hurt the wrong candidate.

This is true for most voting systems except for plurality voting; where a friendly SuperPAC could run a candidate who will draw more votes from your chief opponent than votes from you. Your friendly SuperPAC would need to be careful to not choose a candidate who can beat you.

Strategy for Voters

Many candidates will tell their supporters to "vote only for me". If you heed this request, you may harm the chances of your second favorite candidate and help candidates you dislike. If all voters only choose their favorite candidate, Approval Voting (and most voting systems), will work just like Plurality Voting.

The Center for Election Science, the leading proponent for Approval Voting suggests this strategy for voters:

Step 1: Who is likely to win? Consider the relative utility of each. Of those candidates, approve all whom you prefer. You may end up voting for more than one candidate within this group depending on whom is challenging your preferred candidate(s).

Step 2: Who is less likely to win? Of those candidates, approve of all you wish to give support.

Below is the most controversial part of the article:
It is based on examples found on the Approval Voting page on the Center for Election Science website, but I take quite a few liberties.
Three concerns:
Length
These strategies have not been tested.
Approval Voting might not have enough of a record in government elections to determine if these strategies will work. Credit to Jack Waugh for raising this concern.

For these examples, Rachel Reasonable is your favorite candidate. You also like Peter Popular, but not as much. Dan Donorclass is the major party candidate you fear. The other candidates, Bob Bigmouth, Irene Independent and Carl Crazy, are not popular or well-funded and have no chance of winning.

In all cases, you can safely approve your favorite candidate and support for any or all the “minor” candidates who do not have a chance of winning: Bob Bigmouth, Irene Independent and Carl Crazy.

1 The polls show a very close race between Rachel Reasonable, Peter Popular and Dan Donorclass. Your primary concern is to prevent Dan Donorclass from winning. Approve candidates superior to Dan with a real chance of defeating him; Rachel Reasonable and Peter Popular

2 The polls show a very close race between Rachel Reasonable and Peter Popular; Dan Donorclass has no chance of winning. Here you would vote for Rachel Reasonable, but not Peter; because a vote for Peter could cause Rachel to lose.

3 Dan Donorclass and Peter Popular are in a very close race, Rachel Reasonable has little hope. You vote for Peter to help him defeat Dan and you vote for Rachel to express your support for her.

4 Dan Donorclass and Rachel Reasonable are in a very close race. Peter Popular is not so popular and has little hope. Vote for Rachel, your favorite. You could vote for Peter if you want to express support for him.

How should you vote if you do not have trustworthy polling information? Example 1 covers the situation when you fear a candidate like Dan Donorclass; you approve all candidates better than Dan who have a chance at beating Dan.

What if you fear none of the candidates? Always vote for your favorite candidate. If you are not sure your favorite can beat the leading candidate you oppose, vote for the other candidate you like.

If your favorite cannot beat the other candidates you like, your favorite will probably lose to the strongest candidate you dislike.

Many candidates will tell their supporters to "vote only for me". If you heed this request, you may harm the chances of your second favorite candidate and help candidates you dislike. If all voters only choose their favorite candidate, Approval Voting (and many other voting systems), will work just like Plurality Voting.
The key to making Approval Voting work well is for voters to learn how to vote strategically and ignore candidate pleas to “vote only for me”.

The Spoiler Effect
In plurality races, major party candidates can be “spoiled” by minor candidates with similar platforms. In approval races, voting for your favorite candidate will not harm your preferred major party candidate.

Approval Voting will reveal support for third-party and independent candidates. Plurality Voting under reports support for third-parties. This hurts their efforts to qualify for ballots, generate media publicity, recruit members and candidates, motivate volunteers, raise campaign funds, and win elections.

Center Squeeze Effect
If they fear a centrist candidate, conservative and liberal candidates will entreat moderate voters, squeezing out the centrist candidate. If there is not a competitive moderate in the race, conservative and liberal candidates run highly partisan campaigns to turn out the base. Either way, moderates lose.

If they think they can get away with it, some candidates will send messages with different tones to different groups.

A voting system may resist a center squeeze but no voting system can eliminate a center squeeze when partisan candidates campaign towards the center.

Approval Voting resists a center squeeze by allowing voters to support more than one candidate and rewarding candidates with broad based support.

The Condorcet Criterion
The Condorcet Criterion holds that voting systems must elect a candidate who defeats all others one-on-one (if there is such a candidate). This candidate is called the Condorcet winner.

Approval Voting elects the Condorcet winner in most races. When it does not, Approval Voting should elect a candidate with broad support.

Approval Voting and Run-Off Elections
Approval Voting eliminates the need for Run-Off Elections. Even if no candidate gets over 50% approvals (rare), Approval Voting will elect the candidate with the widest support.

Approval Voting is effective for elections with numerous candidates. However, elections with ten or more candidates are difficult for voters. A two round system could help. In the first round dedicated voters would narrow the field to five candidates who run in the general election.

Usage in American Elections
On June 9th 2020, Fargo ND became the first US city to use Approval Voting, electing John Strand and Arlette Preston to the City Commission. This was a two-winner at-large election with seven candidates. Yes, you can use Approval Voting in multi-winner elections.

The City of St. Louis Missouri uses Approval Voting in open primaries for mayor and Board of Aldermen with top two run-offs.

Given Approval Voting’s advantages over Plurality Voting, we hope to see more jurisdictions use it in upcoming elections.

We support Approval Voting as a major improvement over Plurality Voting.

Sources
The Center for Election Science, Electowiki and Robert J. Weber, the inventor of Approval Voting, are the primary sources for this article.

The leading proponent for Approval Voting is the Center for Election Science. Their site has many articles about Approval Voting, other voting systems, and election theory.

For an extensive list of the benefits of Approval Voting go to the Election Science FAQ pagebolded text.

Electowiki is a great resource for voting systems and government structure. For their thorough explanation go to Approval Voting.

Robert J. Weber, the originator of Approval Voting presents a technical argument supporting the utility of his creation in this paper Approval Voting.

In 2010 Jean-Francois Laslier conducted a pole of 22 participants in a voting procedures workshop, including leading proponents of the Condorcet principle and Alternative Voting (the traditional name for Ranked Choice Voting).

When Laslier proposed using Approval Voting for the poll no one objected, as Approval Voting works well for polls with many candidates, in this case eighteen voting systems.

Approval Voting won with 16 out of a possible 22 approvals, Alternative Voting (RCV) was second with 10 approvals. Plurality Voting received zero approvals. Read Lasliers’s report here.

[Jack Waugh]

Where you start talking about strategy, I'm not sure whether you mean for voters or for those who decide who should run for office. I see that later on, you make clear that you are talking about it for voters.

I am not sure that voting strategy for Approval has been so well studied as to merit advising voters as to what strategy they should use.

This much is known: approving everyone you like never hurts.

Now I will get into my own opinion, not necessarily shared by the other participants in this forum. Suppose there is a candidate who is not among your top favorites but you like her a little bit better than you like Hitler, who is also running, and moreover, you feel that your favorite candidates are not popular with the other voters. Should you approve that compromise candidate? I think you should choose at random. My reasoning is that if many voters do that, that candidate will receive a partial level of support from those voters, not full support.

You misspell "criterion" as ending with "m".

For what it may be worth, here is some argumentation in favor of switching from Choose-one Plurality Voting to Approval Voting that I sent to someone. I don't know whether you will judge that it will help in your purposes of communication to use ideas from it, take it verbatim, or neither.

A voter should be the one to determine which candidates her or his vote supports and opposes. Your committees claimed to be addressing the reasons that the general public has no power in the voting booth, but they ignored the elephant in the room, which is the non-respect of this right. In an N-candidate election for a single seat or office, voters who want to oppose fewer than N - 1 are told to lump it. They are denied the right to cast a vote that reflects their political judgment. But other voters, the ones who want to support exactly one candidate and oppose the rest, get to cast the vote that reflects their judgment. So the system denies the voters equality of influence, one voter to another. This creates a Prisoner's Dilemma that gives people the false impression that they have an incentive to support a "lesser evil" that has money support or fame. The false impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The false impression commands mindshare via the effects of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). It is described over and over again as "realistic" and "math". This can all be defeated by providing equality in the voting booth, one voter to another, which should be provided anyway because it is a right in a representative republic. Even for someone who doesn't grasp how the PD distorts people's mentalities and social interactions, the question should remain relevant, of what grounds there are to tell someone what vote to cast instead of leaving it to the voter. What grounds are there to accept some voters' votes the way they want to cast them, but tell others, no, you can't vote the way you feel or judge. You have to choose from options that don't correspond to your political stance. This is not more moral than excluding some voters because of their color. It's a different rule of discrimination, but it is still an immoral form of discrimination.

Another point in favor of Approval is the standard set down by a majority opinion of the Supreme Court of the US in Wesberry vs. Sanders, 1964. The "weight and worth of the citizens' votes as nearly as is practicable must be the same." So Choose-one Plurality is unconstitutional in the US.