Approval voting
This method is designed to allow voters to express their support for multiple candidates, while both using a simple ballot format and being easy to count.
Some organizations and political bodies have experimented with approval voting to improve representativeness and voter satisfaction.
The concept of approval voting has been discussed and analyzed by social choice theorists and mathematicians, and compared to other electoral systems.
Theoretical analyses have shown that approval voting can lead to more satisfactory outcomes in certain scenarios, but its effectiveness can vary depending on the electoral context and voter behavior.
Research by social choice theorists Steven Brams and Dudley R. Herschbach found that approval voting would increase voter participation, prevent minor-party candidates from being spoilers, and reduce negative campaigning.
[2][3] One study showed that approval would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen) in the first round of the 2002 French presidential election; it instead would have chosen Chirac and Lionel Jospin as the top two candidates to proceed to the runoff.
In the actual election, Le Pen lost by an overwhelming margin in the runoff, 82.2% to 17.8%, a sign that the true top two candidates had not been found.
[6] In November 2020, St. Louis, Missouri, passed Proposition D with 70% voting to authorize a variant of approval (unified primary) for municipal offices.
[7] In 2021, the first mayoral election with approval voting saw Tishaura Jones and Cara Spencer move on to the general with 57% and 46% support.
[9][10] Previously in 2015, a Fargo city commissioner election had suffered from six-way vote-splitting, resulting in a candidate winning with an unconvincing 22% plurality of the vote.
[13] A poll by opponents of approval was conducted to test whether voters had in fact voted strategically according to the Burr dilemma.
[17] In 2023, the North Dakota legislature passed a bill which intended to ban approval voting.
The bill was vetoed by governor Doug Burgum, citing the importance of "home rule" and allowing citizens control over their local government.
Oregon is a fusion voting state, and the party has cross-nominated legislators and statewide officeholders using this method; its 2016 presidential preference primary did not identify a potential nominee due to no candidate earning more than 32% support.
IEEE Executive Director Daniel J. Senese stated that approval was abandoned because "few of our members were using it and it was felt that it was no longer needed.
[48][49][50] Results reported in The Dartmouth show that in the 2014 and 2016 elections, more than 80 percent of voters approved of only one candidate.
[52] It was more fully published in 1978 by political scientist Steven Brams and mathematician Peter Fishburn.
[61] Approval voting allows voters to select all the candidates whom they consider to be reasonable choices.
Approving their second-favorite means the voter harms their favorite candidate's chance to win.
The definition also allows a sincere vote to treat equally preferred candidates differently.
[66] Approval avoids the issue of multiple sincere votes in special cases when voters have dichotomous preferences.
[62] Another way to deal with multiple sincere votes is to augment the ordinal preference model with an approval or acceptance threshold.
Without providing specifics, he argues that the pragmatic judgments of voters about which candidates are acceptable should take precedence over the Condorcet criterion and other social choice criteria.
A rational voter model described by Myerson and Weber specifies an approval strategy that votes for those candidates that have a positive prospective rating.
Using these utilities, voters choose their optimal strategic votes based on what they think the various pivot probabilities are for pairwise ties.
In the first scenario, voters all choose their votes based on the assumption that all pairwise ties are equally likely.
In a case such as this, many voters may have an internal cutoff, and would not simply vote for their top 3, or the above average candidates, although that is not to say that it is necessarily entirely immovable.
Most of the mathematical criteria by which voting systems are compared were formulated for voters with ordinal preferences.
