Russ, You wrote (Sun. Mar.13):
"Since we're discussing names for election methods, I'd like to propose one: Ranked Approval Voting (RAV).
RAV works as follows:
The voter ranks the approved candidates only. The CW wins if one exists, otherwise the least approved candidate is eliminated until a CW is found."
I think that with pre-polls and strategy, this would usually give the same result as IRV. In the three-candidate case,
I see it only giving a different result when a lot of voters have a big sincere ratings gap between their second and third
choice and yet they wouldn't be prepared to order-reverse (Compromise) in IRV.
Otherwise, parties/candidates that see themselves as having a chance of winning will advise their supporters to bullet-vote,
and the same candidates as in IRV will be eliminated.
I don't see why that would happen. I could be missing something, but I don't see why any voter would not approve the same candidates he would approve in a pure approval election. The fact that he gets to rank the approved candidates is just "icing on the cake." How can the voter be any worse off ranking the candidates honestly than he would be letting them all be equal? OK, I understand that equal rankings might be useful in some situations, but if they are available, then the voter can vote all the approved candidates equal as in an actual Approval election.
What is your argument against the even simpler:
"Voters rank the candidates they approve. Elect the CW if there is one, otherwise elect the Approval winner" ?
(or a slightly more complex version that stipulates that the winner must be in the Schwartz or Smith set?).
I think that's a good system too. In fact, I independently thought of it and proposed it recently here on EM, stating in the process that I would be very surprised if it hadn't already been proposed. Indeed it had. I think it is preferable to defeat-dropping Condorcet methods, but I don't think it is as good as RAV because it devolves straight back to Approval in the absense of a CW. It would at least need to restrict the winner to the Smith set to make sense to me.
Regards, Russ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
