Two things that I should add, partly in answer to possible objections: 1. I'd said that it's the Approval voter's own business how s/he uses here approvals.S/he needn't justify it. Don't concern yourself with hir motivation.
But then it occurred to me that you might say that the same could be said about Pl/urality: "It's the voter's own business whom s/he designates favorite. Don't worry about hir motivation. (such as the matter of whether s/he is favorite-burying)" The difference is that the Plurality voter doesn't have a choice. What you call hir voting power isn't fully hirs. S/he doesn't have the power to choose how to rate each candidate. So a comparison to Plurality wouldn't have validity. 2. When answering your comments about electing the candidate given operational approvals by the most voters, I should have mentioned Approval's other optimizations. Even if people are voting strategically: Of course, in a u/a election, Approval elects the candidate who is acceptable to the most voters. In a non-u/a 0-info election, Approval elects the candidate who is above-mean for the most voters. If it's neither of the above, Approval elects the candidate who is better-than-expectation for the most voters. Consider that last one: Approval's general better-than-expectation strategy says to approve the candidates who are better than what you expect from the election. In other words, approve optimistically. If a candidate is exactly what you expect, merit-wise, then it would be reasonable to approve hir too. But, in general, you're approving better-than-expectation candidates. So Appreoval elects the candidate who is, to the most voters, better than what they expected from the election. ...the candidate who whose win is an optimistic prospect to the most voters. ...the candidate whose win is good (even if at least a little unexpected) news to the most voters. ...the candidate who was, to the most voters, at least a little too good to be true. I know I've discussed that before, but I wanted to go into a little more detail, and it seems relevant, since you're claiming that the "most opertional approvals" optimization says nothing about whether one of the strategies was used in choosing the approvals. This optimization that I described above is based on strategic voting. All of the Approval strategies are special cases of better-than-expectation. Mike Ossipoff
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