It seems that voting method "Approval" has cut its
ties to English term "approval" (at least at the EM
list).
In ranking based methods EM people seem to assume
that voters have some easy to identify transitive
order of the candidates in their mind (=sincere
opinion).
I find it revealing that there is not much
discussion on the possibility to cast non-transitive
votes. Such votes would be strategically more
efficient than the transitive ones. Use of
transitive votes seem to reflect the idea that the
sincere opinion of a rational voter would always be
transitive. (Well, of course casting non-transitive
votes would be technically more challenging.)
I want to add to this by saying that if Approval is about approval,
well, then discussions about frontrunner plus strategies won't capture
the intent or point of the method. If the statement for Approval voting
is "vote for those you like", or "vote for those of which you approve",
then one should expect voters to do that, absent strategic incentive.
Say there's a certain group of people that a voter approves of. If he
has to plan beyond that point, then that's strategy. On the other hand,
if Approval really is "pick those candidates you like more than or equal
to the frontrunner you like the most", then there's not much
approval-ish about the method, in the ordinary sense. It asks the voter
to optimally configure his ballot. If we're going to do that, we should
leave the task to a computer and use DSV instead.
Perhaps you agree with most of this, but I couldn't find anywhere else
to put it.
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