Some of the criticisms expressed about Approval Voting (AV) don't strike me as very reasonable. One person objected to AV in a private message because he believes it suffers from the Prisoner's Dilemma problem. But the leading academic advocate fo AV and one of its co-inventors, Steven Brams, is an expert on game theory and surely understands the Prisoner's Dilemma as well as anyone, so that doesn't seem a reasonable objection.
Other people have said that AV favors strategic voters. But none of the arguments to that effect have seemed persuasive to me, because they have failed to take into adequate account the many different preference orderings and strengths that different voters have and the fact that information about the preference orderings and strengths of other voters is so difficult to know and to account for. It seems to me that for many voters, even the most strategically sophisticated ones, it is often impossible to know what the best strategies are for maximizing the impacts of their ballots according to their particular preference orderings and strengths. I wonder if it is not the fact that AV makes strategic voting so difficult to figure out that it works so well and does so well at overcoming the Prisoner's Dilemma problem for voters as a group. To help illustrate the strategic difficulties AV can pose for even strategically sophisicated voters, imagine that in the 2004 election, Bush and Kerry had both been polling about 35% prior to the election and Nader had been polling 25%, with 5% undecided or for other candidates. In this scenario, it is very conceivable that Nader would win an AV election if many Kerry voters regarded him almost as highly as Kerry and much higher than Bush and a smaller percentage of Bush voters regarded him almost as highly as Bush and much higher than Kerry. Call the first group Kerry-Nader voters and the second group Bush-Nader voters. If the pre-election polls are assumed to be very accurate, both Kerry-Nader voters and Bush-Nader voters would have to be concerned about the possibility of a very close election with either Bush or Kerry coming out ahead. Given that, I suspect a significant number of both Kerry-Nader voters and Bush-Nader voters would vote for Nader as a hedge to help ensure that if their first choice doesn't win, their second choice (Nader) will. But it's a difficult choice for them to make. There's no way for any voter, no matter how strategically sophisticated, to know what the best way to vote is. Their hedge vote could prevent their first choice from winning (a bad outcome) but it could also prevent their last choice from winning (a good outcome). AV is not my favorite method, and I'm not advocating it here for presidential elections. But I don't think it's nearly as bad a method as many people have been saying, and it does have one distinct advantage. It's very easy to tally an AV election. No new voting equipment is needed. It can be done easily with even hand counted paper ballots. It can also be done easily and quickly in meetings where voters must choose from among three or more options. This happens a lot, as for example when an organization is trying to decide where the next meeting should be or a new organization is trying to pick a permanent name. Even for presidential elections, given the many problems with current election equipment, an AV vote with hand counted paper ballots would have been a vast improvement over how the 2004 election was actually carried out. -Ralph Suter ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
