Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise
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@jack-waugh I am not sure that I agree with the framing of opposition as simply anything less than the average support for candidates. Positive sentiment and negative sentiment are qualitatively different experiences -- given a set of 5 friends, I do not necessarily dislike the one who I like less than the others on average; given a set of 5 enemies, I do not necessarily like the one who I dislike less than the others on average.
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@k98kurz the qualitative experience of a voter has only little to do with the tactics they will employ to get what they want most. We also have to consider what can be easily implemented. While I don’t disagree with you about the suggestion that certain improvements could be made, I do believe (in agreement now with @SaraWolk) that this kind of argument is actually counterproductive to getting voting reform off the ground in the current phase. Adjustments can be made later. Right now we need to get something decent through to replace choose one voting, and that should be urgent priority #1. I strongly believe that the best way we can do that is by pushing with a concerted effort for basic, ordinary approval voting. My opinion is that we need to shift away from the “anything other than choose one” attitude and toward a specific replacement, and my estimation is that approval voting—while definitely not perfect—is the least contentiously agreed upon improvement.
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@cfrank approval voting would be the simplest, though it might be easier to convince judges who hold to the simplistic "one person, one vote" mantra that combined approval voting allows any one vote to exactly counteract another, not giving any one voter an unfair advantage.
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@k98kurz What you mean "combined"?
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@cfrank said in Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise:
my estimation is that approval voting—while definitely not perfect—is the least contentiously agreed upon improvement.
Why doesn't a granule size of 10% instead of 100% qualify as least-contentiously agreed-upon improvement? At least one informant tells me that Approval looks insufficiently expressive for assigning a score to a compromise candidate.
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I agree that Approval is a workable compromise and I think it should be the default voting method (as opposed to Choose One Plurality.)
On whether it should be the one reform we all work to implement, I don't agree. I don't think Approval is persuasive, and I don't think it's competitive against RCV, the status quo in voting reform. I wish it was.
I absolutely encourage advocates to continue to advocate, and I'll keep advocating for it, but I'm more persuaded now than ever that we need a reform that is scaleable, viable, and that delivers on the goals set out by RCV advocates while addressing it's serious pitfalls.
Approval voting tells inspired voting reformers to stop caring about the things they think they want, to change their priorities, and to trust the simulations over their intuition. That's not a winning pitch. The many benefits of Approval are neither transparent or self-evident to lay people and it appears to violate one person one vote, even though it should be the gold standard.
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@sarawolk said in Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise:
competitive against RCV
In this connection, I refer you to the thread on Score // Llull.
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@sarawolk that’s unfortunate, I understand your view. I was not pro approval until recently. In terms of RCV, I assume you mean IRV. I wish at least Tideman’s bottom two runoff were pushed instead. More ideally this would help avoid monotonicity failures but is probably too complicated: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/316/tideman-s-bottom-n-runoff?_=1716877581500
score-stratified-condorcet [10] cardinal-condorcet [9] ranked-condorcet [8] score [7] approval [6] ranked-bucklin [5] star [4] ranked-irv [3] ranked-borda [2] for-against [1] distribute [0] choose-one [0]
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@cfrank I say Ranked Voting to be more inclusive of ranked methods. (Ranked Choice/RCV is IRV and also sometimes STV).
Sidenote: Since advocates call IRV RCV, but academics and electoral theorists call it IRV, they have a firewall between the method and its scientific criticisms.
That's a problem and I strongly encourage us to all start calling it what they call it so the algorithms and search engines connect the two.
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@sarawolk you mean for us to use RCV instead of IRV? What do we call non-IRV ranked choice voting methods? I get that the onus is on us to make the alteration, but it’s actually both strange and quite annoying that IRV has presumptuously taken that title, as if other ranked choice voting methods don’t exist.
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@sarawolk said in Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise:
@cfrank I say Ranked Voting to be more inclusive of ranked methods. (Ranked Choice/RCV is IRV and also sometimes STV).
Sidenote: Since advocates call IRV RCV, but academics and electoral theorists call it IRV, they have a firewall between the method and its scientific criticisms.
That's a problem and I strongly encourage us to all start calling it what they call it so the algorithms and search engines connect the two.
I think a better compromise might be to call it IRV but mention that some people call it RCV in brackets, so it's still linked for search engine purposes.
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@toby-pereira The lay person audience is already more familiar with RCV than IRV, if you add in jargon (like Instant Runoff Voting/IRV) or even use multiple terms for the same thing, you lose people and use up cognitive load that you want to save for your actual points.
It's bad enough that there isn't a single clear term for Choose One Voting/ Plurality/FPTP.
My advice is to call the ranked ballot family of voting methods "Ranked Voting", call IRV "Ranked Choice Voting" and call FPTP "Choose One Voting".
In academic contexts, we should also use these common words but then have the technical names in parenthesis. The target audience for this stuff is groups like LWV who form non-expert volunteer committees to get up to speed and study reforms before making recommendations that carry massive weight.
This is another reason to not rebrand Approval, which already has a clear and self explanatory name.
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@toby-pereira said in Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise:
call it IRV but mention that some people call it RCV in brackets
I further qualify it "Hare".
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@jack-waugh said in Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise:
@k98kurz What you mean "combined"?
By "combined approval voting", I mean score voting with the options Disapprove (-1), Neutral (0), and Approve (+1); a candidate's score is the sum of "Approve" votes minus the sum of "Disapprove" votes. Iirc, I read that the Republic of Venice used CAV in its elections for around 500 years, though the name of the method is of much more recent origin.
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@k98kurz there are a few points to make about the Republic of Venice as it might compare to the situation we face now.
First, based on what I’m reading, it was mostly a hereditary, aristocratic oligarchy without broad-based democratic participation. It did not have a written constitution, or a formal bill of rights. Second, it was not a confederation of sovereign states but a centralized unitary government. Third, it had a much smaller and more homogenous population (in terms of culture) than the United States, which was spread out over far less land and simultaneously had a lower population density.
These things make it much easier for the small elite political class to settle affairs in whatever way they might agree upon amongst themselves, including using a chosen voting system. The political elite class was also much more highly educated than the rest of the population. When it comes to voting systems for us, there are strict laws and regulations that need to be satisfied, in addition to the need for support from a much more numerous and heterogeneous population, many of whom are relatively uneducated or misinformed, compounded with deliberate efforts against technical voting reform by our own political elite (and associated media). This is why I’m advocating for a simple reform, like approval voting. I’m also considering what @SaraWolk suggests, namely that another method like RCV (IRV) might be a more practical conduit for change, even though it is significantly less ideal.
score-stratified-condorcet [10] cardinal-condorcet [9] ranked-condorcet [8] score [7] approval [6] ranked-bucklin [5] star [4] ranked-irv [3] ranked-borda [2] for-against [1] distribute [0] choose-one [0]
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I'm just going to recenter that the entire basis of Approval as an effective and potentially-immediate compromise is that it doesn't require new ballots, machines, meaningfully different LEO procedures, noteworthy voter education, federal process certification, revised audit procedures, etc.
You just flip a switch. Uncheck the "discard overvotes" box, rewrite one sentence on the instructions line (in each language), and make sure the LEO guidance on tabulation reflects all this. The end. $0.
Extending the proposal to anything that actually requires a new ballot/process/everything defeats the entire point of the exercise. For that implementation cost, you could do practically any constitutionally valid single-winner system.
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@chocopi said in Approval Voting as a Workable Compromise:
$0.
I think we all know this figure is missing a few zeroes. /s
More importantly, this still leaves the issue of the Electoral College. How would we translate the EC district votes into EC votes under this system? Approval voting would be an immediate improvement for electing Congress Critters and state/local officials, but at some point we'll have to think through how to reform the Electoral College. The way I see it, abolishing the EC is too radical a proposition to have associated with any advocacy for an Approval Voting reform, so a plausible idea for how the EC could work is worth having. Simply leaving the EC the way it is while selecting Electors using Approval Voting would probably lead to more problems.
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This is sort of a seperate question, even if it is a logical next one.
Think of it this way: We are talking about electing legislators with a new voting system. We are not talking about the legislators using a new voting system to vote on bills. That might also be a good idea, but it's an entirely seperate matter.
The electoral college is similar. Each electorate elects a (single) desired target for their state's delegation to vote for. We're not talking about how the delegations themselves vote. That might also be a good idea, but it's an entirely seperate matter.
Of course, there is more reason to address the latter than the former; legislature are deliberative bodies, while the Electoral College as currently set up is basically not. But the point is they are legally and functionally an independent system. In both examples, there is little reason for the representative body to conduct itself in the exact same way as the preceeding public vote.
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Even though Approval is simplest and least costly to implement once the decision is made to do so, the decision still has to be made, and that requires convincing people that a change is worthwhile. Probably all of us who participate here agree that the effect on politics of putting Approval in place for important offices would be revolutionary, but as a marketing presentation, Approval might not look as shiny as Score-B2R. Of the reforms that have been enacted, Hare has been tried the most times, and Approval exists only in two localities and only for municipal elections. Either flash sells, or the money and propaganda support made the difference. Maybe our best marketing strategy is to try slide B2R IRV rating-ballots into the place of Hare IRV RCV in popular mindshare as a solution with the same flash but without the disappointing and counterintuitive results that Hare often delivers.
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First, I'll point out that Fargo is raw Approval and St. Louis is Approval-into-Runoff. These behave very differently. (Hint: the latter is way better, and is basically STAR's twin brother.)
Second, I am in complete agreement that the best path forward is simple improvements to IRV.
But you can do even simplier and better than BTR. You just slap a Condorcet check on it, the end.
Your ballots are now precinct summable and monotonic outside of cycles. The results are incredibly straightforward, ("Here's how much the winner beats everyone else by:") yet it also produces a complete pairwise matrix for any campaigns or political scientists who want it. It's 100% Condorcet efficient; no more center-squeeze, maximimally resistant to polarization. It's fully cloneproof.
And best of all, it exhibits the highest strategy resistance of any method. (Only Baldwin's comes close.)
BTR is good, but it should be regarded as strictly inferior to the more straightforward Condorcet//Hare alternatives unless you are somehow at a loss for computational speed.
