Push for renaming "Approval" as "Choose Any"
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"Approval" is a misnomer and confusing. It does NOT ask voters whether they approve or disapprove. Voters can approve all or none and still mark some as preferred over others.
What's clearly going on is "choose any" instead of "choose one" (also, please encourage everyone to stop saying FPTP and Plurality voting, those are horrible, confusing, inaccurate names). Choose-One Voting versus Choose-Any Voting is obviously the better clearer way to describe these things.
Choose-Any Voting has ZERO information about approval, and implying wrongly that it does has all sorts of ramifications including confusing people about how to think about it.
As a transition, we could say "Choose-Any (aka Approval)" until people eventually catch on and get used to the better name.
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@wolftune I agree it’s a bit of a misnomer. It’s hard to change names after history has etched them down. I started calling it “support” voting, referring to the mathematical support of a distribution. It also has less connotation than “approve.” Maybe it’ll change! But we still call “choose one” “FPTP” and “plurality” more often than “choose one.”
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 concerted efforts for language change absolutely works. There are lots of examples. Even in this space, "instant runoff" got rebranded "ranked-choice" in practice.
"Support Voting" is too broad, almost every voting system fits that description.
"Choose One" and "Choose Any" are so dramatically superior and clear as names, they will catch on faster than other rebranding if we just do it. "Approval Voting" is not something the general public even knows as a term really, only people in voting-reform circles still.
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@wolftune IRV wasn’t largely in the public consciousness of the USA until groups like FairVote started promoting it in the 1990s. It took a decade for acknowledgment of the system to grow, and by then it had subsumed the name “ranked choice.” So it wasn’t as if people made a concerted effort to change the widely accepted name in that case. In fact, I would say more people try to reverse the name change, because it’s a presumptuous moniker that obscures other ranked choice systems.
Anyway, maybe there are examples. But I doubt whether they were efforts not in line with the mainstream or status quo.
