Ahem. Range and Approval reward sincere voting, if sincere is
understood. The "insincere voting" that they allegedly reward is based
on assumptions of what the votes mean that are inaccurate and
essentially baseless. Certainly a vote under Approval doesn't mean that
the voter "approves" of the candiate, in the ordinary sense. It's an
unfortunate name for the method, for this reason. Count All the Votes is
what I like to call it. Open Voting might be a nice name, what do you
think?
Open Voting.
Yes, I like it.
Range and Approval might not be insincere (if we accept your
definition), but they still require voters to use strategy - that is, to
keep the votes of others in mind when they're voting. In Approval in
particular, this is very important (consider the Bush-Gore-Nader
situation - do you vote for Nader, or {Nader, Bush}?). Therefore the
method will work to the degree that the voters know this information
(from polls, etc).
If that's true, why not just lighten the load on the voters? Why should
the voters have to know whether polls are accurate, who's in the lead,
and so on? Use a computer to strategize instead. DSV.
Now, DSV might have strategies, and these strategies may include order
reversal; but first, those strategies will be hard to employ (like in
other good ranked voting systems), and second, they're really just
reflections of what instability may exist in the underlying voting
system plus strategy (e.g, if you're voting strategically in
Approval-DSV, you're emulating lying on the polls others use to inform
their Approval decision, for instance).
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