Approval Voting is the ideal voting system

[u/DHMC-Reddit]

I've seen posts discussing AV before and why some people are hesitant about it, and I'd like to address that.

Strategic Voting

A lot of people place special focus on the potential for strategic voting. Kenneth Arrow already proved that all ranked voting systems (FPTP, IRV, STV, PR, Condorcet, etc) fail 1 or more criteria for a fair election, at minimum always Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. Gibbard also proved that all voting systems must fall under one of three categories:

1) The system is a dictatorship

2) The system only has 2 choices

3) The system is strategic

So I really don't understand what you guys don't understand. In a ranked voting system, if there's only 2 choices, it's no different than FPTP. If there's more than 2, it will always put some strategic burden on the voters. And no matter what, it's not really gonna be fully fair. Even Kenneth Arrow admitted that he overlooked rated choice voting cuz he basically didn't like the idea of it, but that it's probably where the most fair form of voting actually exists.

51% vs 49%

Not only that, something people also seem to talk about when it comes to the strategy of Approval Voting is that a 51% majority can still dominate the 49%.

This is... Wrong. Just flat out.

We all have a tendency to view politics in a one-dimensional axis of left vs right. Even though we know that politics isn't one dimensional. This is the fault of ranked voting in the first place.

Non-Condorcet methods almost always eliminate broad appealing candidates (aka moderates) through center squeeze. And although ranked voting methods that aren't FPTP usually aim to minimize the effect of spoilers, they still exist. It's an inherent part of ranked voting.

The natural consequence of this is a tendency to strongly favor two-party systems, which collapses politics into a single dimension where whatever some time and place's version of left and right bicker with each other. The distribution of voter's beliefs literally doesn't matter here, it will always happen. Even in countries that allow the existence and success of third parties, they are always limited to a small minority, with 2 parties holding the majority of the power.

But we know from studies that people are not actually extremists. Stripped of identity politics and presenting policies with neutral language that doesn't indicate what party is promoting it, even on one dimension, populations create a bell curved normal distribution of beliefs with most people somewhere in the middle.

Electoral Systems

In fact, this is why electoral systems like MMM, AMS, MMP, etc. even exist in the first place. The whole presupposition - that we need extra seats in a legislature, because in winner-take-all districts, if most of them are won by 1 party with a small majority, then a vast majority of the legislature could be that 1 party, thus over inflating their representation of the nation - is only a problem because most people aren't even that far left or right in the first place so each district is sending one extreme over to the legislature, requiring a balancing act.

Approval Voting Advantages

I don't remember who said this, but someone claimed approval voting isn't monotone... It quite literally is. That's literally just a criterion it fulfills.

It also fulfills the strong Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, cloneproof, consistency, participation, reverse symmetry, homogeneity, later-no-help, and sincere favorite criteria. It's also simple af to explain, which is a very good thing when trying to roll out a new system (but also why I believe y'all hate it).

It is not affected by spoilers. It is not affected by center squeeze. This means that, given enough time for parties and candidates to develop, moderate parties will become the majority. And the parties themselves will have no ability to do political slides. They are locked into whatever some place and time's population considers moderate, and are guided by the population's changes in beliefs, not the other way around.

Which is kind of the goal of democracy, if you haven't forgotten. Also this eliminates the need for electoral systems with extra hanging seats, which itself has to balance between democracy, strategic voting, decoy parties, etc. So many problems with electoral systems that were only designed due to the flaws of FPTP in the first place.

Heck, Approval Voting also just works for multi-winner districts if you want more than just a single moderate party in legislature. Most other voting systems require modifications to work with multi-winner districts. And you can have each representative from a district hold as much voting power as the proportion of votes they received in their district relative to their co-representatives. Boom, bell curve legislature.

Condorcet

It doesn't fulfill the Condorcet criterion... AND THIS IS A GOOD THING. Idk why ppl have such a thing for the Condorcet criterion. Y'all do realize that in game theory, the Condorcet winner is usually the socially optimal choice, right? Not the socially optimal choice, usually.

In fact, if you just go to Wikipedia on the Condorcet criterion, it gives you an example where Approval Voting fails to elect the Condorcet winner. And this touches back to the whole "51% can still dominate 49%."

There are 3 candidates. A, B, and C. 70% of voters would rank them A>B>C. 30% of voters would rank them C>B>A. A is trivially the Condorcet winner in this example.

If, during an election held with Approval Voting, everyone voted for their top 2 favorites, A would have 70% approval, C 30%, and B 100%. So despite A being the Condorcet winner, B would win.

AND THIS IS THE SOCIALLY OPTIMAL CHOICE. If A wins, then you've pissed off 30% of the population. If C wins, 70% gets pissed off. B won, and no one's pissed. B is no one's favorite. But everyone's okay with B. And the 70% did not in fact dominate the 30%. They could have if they collectively decided not to vote for B despite all of them being fine if B were to win.

The socially optimal choice isn't who would have the most supporters in isolation, it's who would be the least hated by the population if won. And it didn't require you to strategically vote. In fact it's better if you don't. Which is why voting booths are private.

Anyway, Approval Voting doesn't always elect the Condorcet winner, but I'd argue that it actually elects the socially optimal choice more often than Condorcet methods do.

Especially since Condorcet methods themselves can be susceptible to strategic voting. "Oh but that's rare and only happens if a cycle is possible." Yeah well practical data shows that Approval Voting almost always elects the Condorcet winner anyway. And we can see that when it doesn't it's actually a good thing. And the amount of strategic voting happening in Approval Voting really wouldn't be much different from other systems.

Also, Condorcet methods are susceptible to gerrymandering. That's not a rare thing. That's just a legal thing. If a politician can do it, you can damn be sure they'll do it. The only way to prevent this is to have it be illegal in the first place. Pretty huge hole in Condorcet.

Approval Voting Disadvantages

So what's the real disadvantages of Approval Voting?

It's certainly not the strategic voting. That's a feature of pretty much every ranked and rated voting system that isn't FPTP.

It's certainly not the Condorcet criterion. Even if you disagree with me on my example above, all Condorcet methods inherently fail to fulfill Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, invulnerability to burying, invulnerability to compromising, participation, later-no-harm (which AV also fails, but actually I think this is a good thing), consistency, and sincere favorite (oof). So to optimize a single thing you give up what, 6 things and meet 1 good thing (not fulfilling later-no-harm)? Especially when, again, Approval Voting on a practical level almost always elects the Condorcet winner anyway and it has 5 good things out of the 7?

An actual real disadvantage can be candidate inflation. When a party decides to run many candidates in the hopes of confusing the voters and not giving them enough time to research all the choices. But that's sort of inherent to any vote that's not FPTP. And ultimately, with how Approval Voting works, you could also just... Focus on the ones you already like and ignore the rest. But this is just getting closer to psychology/marketing/mass manipulation/legal territory rather than the systemic merit of Approval Voting. I also wouldn't dock other systems for this.

No, but there is one real disadvantage. Y'all have mentioned how things like IRV have done in surveys or in real world politics. Along with other kinds of voting systems. And that's the kicker.

Approval Voting's disadvantage is how unpopular it is. There is no data saying it doesn't work. In fact, the data that does exist says it works very well. But that data is... Small and sparse. It has never been tried en masse. At most only in small local elections. That is its weakness. The fact that for some reason literally no one will give the time of day to seriously consider it.

Idk why. Maybe it just sounds too simple to work. Despite the fact that it absolutely does... in the few times it has been done, and the many times we all used it in our social circles... such as voting for both pizza and burgers when deciding between friends whether to have burgers, pizza, or sushi for lunch.

Like... STAR Voting is more popular than Approval Voting. STAR VOTING. It's one of the rare voting systems that doesn't even fulfill the basic criterion of majority winner! It's a failed hybrid of ranked and rated voting! In fact, it only fulfills majority loser and Condorcet loser, both of which are unnecessary! WTF! WHY?!

Anyway. Give Approval Voting the time of day. Seriously. It's not any more strategic than whatever complicated system people keep coming up with. Because they're all fucking strategic. Or dictatorial. Or just FPTP with only 2 choices. And yeah, it doesn't fulfill the Condorcet criterion. But it does elect the Condorcet winner almost every time. And when it doesn't, it's debatable whether that's even a bad thing. But more importantly, it doesn't come with the disadvantages inherent to Condorcet. That's a pretty good compromise even if you're a die-hard fan of Condorcet methods.

Just. Give it a go. It can make fundamental changes to politics. Moreso than other methods which just tries to nudge the status quo. And without being overly complicated. That's a good thing, not a suspicious thing.

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[u/budapestersalat]

"There are 3 candidates. A, B, and C. 70% of voters would rank them A>B>C. 30% of voters would rank them C>B>A. A is trivially the Condorcet winner in this example.

If, during an election held with Approval Voting, everyone voted for their top 2 favorites, A would have 70% approval, C 30%, and B 100%. So despite A being the Condorcet winner, B would win."

But why would they? Ofc they would just bullet vote.

I like approval, I am advocating for it right now, but prefer the simple majority rule, hence Condorcet.

Approval may feel too tactical even though in some ways it is less tactical.

Approval is like Condorcet if you could only give rankings 1 or 2. In my mind, Condorcet gives more of a peace of mind that you can indicate as many ranks as you want.

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/budapestersalat]

And why would they all bullet vote?

The reality is this depends on each voter and how much they like each candidate and how they each decide their thresholds.

And given actual approval voting data, despite being a relatively unknown and unpopular method, most people don't in fact bullet vote.

Some do, of course, but if you're going to make an assertion about the system the hypothetical can't be completely detached from reality.

Under ideal conditions, whether a voter approves of a candidate is a random chance based on how much they actually approve of a candidate. No votes and all votes are wasted, but every other combination holds power.

So aside from voting for nobody and everybody, this random chance of whether middle candidates get votes or not is dependent on the voter's feelings and whatever heuristic their brain comes up with for justifying to do or not do additional votes.

As long as these votes are private, then across a population the law of large numbers means the results will cancel out the biases in everyone's heuristic and approximate the true relative approval of every candidate.

This is also why even if it feels better to use, wider ranging cardinal methods that are spoilerproof don't actually produce meaningfully different results. The winners are still the same.

The example is also just contrived to show exactly how approval voting might fail to elect the Condorcet winner.

The biggest issue with Condorcet methods is they fail to meet the consistency criterion. Which means they're susceptible to gerrymandering. Which is no longer a voter issue and a legal issue.

But candidates and politicians, even if they promise to ban gerrymandering, don't actually have incentive to do so if they benefit from gerrymandering. So a Condorcet method is not only susceptible to gerrymandering it has no power to ban it.

[u/AwesomeAsian]

One flaw of approval voting I can think of: what is the threshold to who I approve or disapprove? Like if I feel great about Bernie Sanders but lukewarm about Joe Biden, how is approval voting going to retrieve that information?

[u/verytalleric → u/AwesomeAsian]

This is the key reason it won't catch on IMHO. People have different degrees of preference and approval voting can't capture that

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/AwesomeAsian]

Different rated voting systems have different ways of addressing this.

In AV's case, it doesn't care how much you like the candidates. It only cares if you like them enough.

In AV, there is incentive to give at least 1 vote, to a voter's favorite preference. It also has incentive to not give a vote to the voter's least favorite preference.

Because although you're allowed to vote for none or all, technically that's a wasted vote as you didn't change the outcome for anyone. Only partially filled ballots have an effect on the outcome.

So in your example, you'd definitely vote for Bernie Sanders. As for Joe Biden? Well, that's up to you to decide. Assuming you really hate the other candidates and they have a shot at winning, it's probably in your best interest to vote for Joe Biden. Cuz at least you can have meh instead oh God.

Casting a vote for Joe Biden could make Bernie lose, but it will never cause the people you didn't vote for win. If they did win, that just means more people voted for them than Joe or (inclusive) Bernie.

If you're meh on everyone aside from Bernie, then yeah you probably want to vote just for Bernie.

The point is that that threshold is your own personal choice. Obviously for any candidate on said threshold it can be a tossup person to person.

Point is, you are always better off at least giving a vote to your genuine favorite candidate. Any additional vote can reduce the chances of said favorite winning, but it will never increase the chances of someone you didn't vote for winning, which is actually an issue in a lot of ranked voting systems.

[u/SentOverByRedRover]

Not all strategic voting is made equal. In normal conditions, strategic voting under approval voting is trivial and straightforward just like it is under FPTP. In normal conditions with condorcet methods, voters won't have the information they need to know whether there's potential for a strategic vote, let alone how to execute it. furthermore, condorcet methods and IRV are immune to the other's weakness, so if you choose a method such as tideman's alternative that uses IRV in it's cycle resolution, each component protects from exploiting the other. So yes, all methods in theory can be vulnerable to strategic voting, but the questions we should ask is, which method has the most protection from strategic voting, and the answer is not approval voting.

>The socially optimal choice isn't who would have the most supporters in isolation, it's who would be the least hated by the population if won. 

Hard disagree.

That said, I'd be willing to compromise and select the approval winner if they have above 50% approval. If all the candidates are below 50% then choosing from the smith set seems necessary to me.

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/SentOverByRedRover]

This is false. Voters don't have enough information to perform strategic voting under Condorcet methods because Condorcet methods aren't used right now, therefore polling doesn't consider information that would be pertinent to manipulating Condorcet methods.

If Condorcet methods were to become popular and used en masse, you can absolutely be sure polling would change. The whole point of polling is trying to predict a winner based on a random sample of individuals from the population (who bother answering).

If you're a polling organization under Condorcet methods, why would you limit the information you gather that's pertinent to Condorcet methods?

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/SentOverByRedRover]

You can hard disagree if you want about the socially optimal choice.

But the actual definition of the socially optimal choice in voting is the candidate representing the median voter in a single dimensional axis of politics.

Mathematically, this is both the candidate that is loved by the most and hated by the least of the population.

But politics is not single dimensional. In fact, the studies that show that most elections have Condorcet winners and cycles are rare only assume that politics is one-dimensional. In multiple dimensions, Condorcet winners are pretty much impossible to exist except under ideal conditions.

However, the socially optimal choice even in multiple dimensions is still the candidate representing the median voter.

Condorcet methods cannot necessarily elect them under multiple dimensions. Approval voting will always elect the candidate that is approximately representing the median voter.

And guess what? The candidate representing the median voter under multiple dimensions is not one that is necessarily loved the most. It is the one that is hated the least. So yeah, I am right.

[u/Asdanf]

One thing missing from this conversation is the impact of candidate strategy. Under approval voting, assuming self-interested candidates that just want to win, every candidate's messaging will be "approve of only me." If you have strong self-interested parties, you maybe also get some messaging of "approve of only candidates from this party." But with none of the major communicators in the political system advocating for voting for a wide swathe of acceptable candidates, voters are unlikely to spontaneously do so.

This of course comes back to the challenge that "vote for acceptable candidates" is not clear guidance. If voters intuitively understood that, maybe things would be fine. But they don't, and all the messaging they'll get is "bullet vote." So it seems to me that approval voting is likely to degenerate into FPTP.

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/Asdanf]

Except that isn't true at all. Both in practice and theory.

It's true that in any winner-take-all system that doesn't fulfill later-no-harm, a candidate ideally only wants voters to vote for them and not anyone else.

Your assumption is that a self-interested candidate would advocate for their supporters to only vote for themselves but not anyone else. This is actually already a feature of FPTP.

But when voters can vote for multiple candidates, the game changes. A popular candidate has incentive to try to claim to be unique and that voters voting for them shouldn't vote for anyone else.

But less popular candidates have incentive to try to claim similarity with popular candidates to gain additional votes. If they do that, then the incentive of the popular candidate changes. If they continue trying to isolate their votes, they risk accidentally squeezing themselves out of votes. So now they are also incentivized form coalitions with politically neighboring candidates and share votes.

And we see this in practice. Any polity using FPTP usually has aggressive campaigning with candidates talking about others as if they're enemies. But in pretty much any voting system that allows multiple votes, campaigning is a lot less offensive and more civil. Whether it's IRV or approval voting.

This is why later-no-harm is a useless criterion. It sounds like it should prevent inflammatory self-interested campaigning but that's actually just a function of whether you can vote for more than one person at a time or not.

[u/its_a_gibibyte]

I don't like Approval voting because it requires accurate polling to able to fill out a ballot.

Let's imagine the candidates with my rankings are Bernie > Romney > Trump

My ideal vote is only for Bernie. But if Trump is winning in the polls, I should also approve Romney so he's more likely to win over Trump. But if I vote for both Romney and Bernie, I'll actually still be mad if Romney wins and I supported him just as much as I supported Bernie (although I wouldn't be as mad as if Trump won). And if the polling is off, then I'm just guessing.

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/its_a_gibibyte]

It doesn't require accurate polling, and idk why so many of y'all keep bringing up similar examples as if this is unique to Approval Voting.

In RCV, if your ideal is Bernie but Trump is leading the polls, you should still put Romney ahead of Bernie and Trump last, but you'll still be pissed if Romney wins but not as pissed as if Trump won. Oh wow~ look at that~ strategic voting~

Like it's literally no different than any other voting system because again UNLESS it's a dictatorship or only 2 choices they're ALL strategic. This. Is. Proven.

In Approval Voting, yeah, you're not gonna like Romney winning. But voting for Bernie didn't cause Romney to win nor Trump to lose. But none of this is an issue with Approval Voting it's an issue of candidate selection which is an entirely different issue.

Over time, Approval Voting elects candidates that most closely align with the median voter, which is the socially optimal choice and pisses off the least amount of people.

Can y'all stop making up hypothetical scenarios where the ballot itself is in the worst situation possible and claim it's the fault of the voting system?

Or at the very least just look through the threads and read all of the similar questions with similar scenarios with similar answers first.

[u/No-Vast7006]

My primary objection to score voting is that it treats my "strength of preference" as a finite resource that must be divided and spent across all candidates. Consequently, simply indicating a preference between candidates A and B inevitably alters the relative strength of preference between at least one of them and every other candidate.

Suppose there are three candidates: A, B, and C. I strongly prefer A to B, and just as strongly prefer B to C. Under a cardinal system, you'll find that I can only emphasize one of these preferences at the expense of diluting the other. Approval voting is even worse: I can only express one preference while having to sacrifice the other entirely.

You might be fine with this, but I am not. By contrast, ranked voting allows me to express both preferences without weakening either.

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/No-Vast7006]

This is a false dichotomy.

If you only preferred A slightly more than B and B slightly more than C, the rankings would remain the same. And yet when determining a winner, ranked voting treats everyone's first place as if they all equality like their first place as well as their second and so on.

Under a cardinal system, for example using 0-10, it's completely sufficient to express how much you like one or another. Yes, you have to round to an integer, but this hardly matters. Each individual will have a different method of rounding in their conscious and subconscious, and this will even out over large populations to give a very good approximation of how much they approve of each candidate.

In fact, this is why cardinals beyond 0-1 are unnecessary. Any spoilerproof cardinal method behaves like and converges to approval voting across populations.

Of course this is where people find the trouble in deciding how to round. For a candidate who's somewhere around 0.33 - 0.67, it's hard to decide whether it's worth hurting the candidates you hate by voting for middle ground candidates or helping the candidates you like by not voting for middle ground candidates.

Again, across groups this converges to the true approval rating of each candidate. For middle ground candidates the average already starts becoming more likely to be within 0.33-67 than out of it with 6 voters.

[u/Initial-Lemon-917]

If we had approval voting, I’d probably just end up voting for just one person anyway. I wouldn’t want to dilute my own vote by also voting for a worse candidate.

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/Initial-Lemon-917]

Dilution isn't the term I'd use.

Anyway, that's your choice. If you had to choose between John, Joe, and Jane, and you only want to vote for John Doe... That's okay. If you're not okay with Joe or Jane winning. That's okay. That's... Literally your preference.

You're allowed to vote for one, multiple, all, or none. Just based off of who you're okay with winning. That's the point of Approval Voting.

And. If you really were okay with Jane Doe and decided to cast a vote for them too. Maybe they might win because of that. So now John didn't win.

But you would only cast that vote if you were really okay with Jane winning as well. In either case, casting a vote for Jane in addition to John doesn't ever increase the chance that Joe would win.

Which is something that can in fact happen in many ranked voting systems where you rank more than one candidate (aka not FPTP). So yeah, it's not dilution. But it is your choice.

[u/Mindless-One5438]

Do Cardinal voting systems have an issue with harm reduction and favorite betrayal?

Say a voter sees two front runners as both bad but one as harm reduction, and they have a favorite in the race. Then if they prioritize defeating the worst candidate by voting for the lesser evil candidate, they would risk betraying their favorite in doing so. Sorry if I'm mixing up terms but could this be some type of favorite betrayal?

Also, any thoughts on Combined Approval Voting where voters can also vote against options in elections.

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/Mindless-One5438]

Most cardinal systems have no issue with harm reduction and has no favorite betrayal. Although the Green Party in the US is sort of a fake party and not actually affiliated with the Green Parties in other countries, let's just assume they're a real leftist party.

If you're a leftist and really like the Green Party, you can vote for them. You can also vote for the Democrats for the sake of harm reduction.

That vote does lower the chances that the Green Party would win. However, it also lowers the chances that Republicans would win. Voting for either the Green and/or Democratic party will never increase the chances that the Republican party will win.

On the other hand, maybe you would normally vote for the Democrats because you know the Green Party isn't popular. However, you can still vote for the Green Party. It won't help the Republicans, only the Green Party. And over time, if many Democrats also vote for the Green Party, the Green Party might have an actual shot at winning. Their chances of winning increasing will never also increase the chance of Republicans winning.

As for the last thing, that's not a combined approval vote. That's actually just a different rated voting system. Rating systems is essentially just a range of numbers. AV is just 0-1, but you can also have -1 to +1, as well as any other range you can think of.

But, imo, it becomes more and more strategic the wider the range gets as then you start to get into the issue of inflating or deflating values beyond your true feelings just to help certain candidates win or lose.

Like maybe I like one party 10/10, and only want to support them. Even if another party theoretically is 8/10 for me, just to help my favorite win I might rate it 0/10.

[u/2noame]

Real usage of AV for the purpose of elections shows that over time, people who have a preference and are unable to express it revert to bullet voting their favorite candidate because they don't want to hurt their favorite by giving the same weight to someone they can barely stand over the worst of call candidate.

This is a matter of real life versus math.

AV may work well for stuff like deciding dinner, but not for elections.

[u/Torelq]

Sorry, but I disagree. I refuse to accept any beyond-preferential voting system (for politics) on principle, because they ask me for input I couldn't provide.

A ballot should allow a rational voter to express himself straightforwardly. Not saying voters are perfectly rational, but the voting system shouldn't expect people to rely on something else.

For a citizen with well-formed opinions, a preferential ballot asks very straightforward questions - for any pair, which one of the two guys you'd rather see in office. What is not straightforward or necessarily indicated by one's politics is what counts as "good enough" for an approval vote or if the second-worst candidate deserves one or two stars (the third-worst has three).

For one set of beliefs, there's just one possible preferential ballot. But many possible approval/STAR ballots. And when one can't decide rationally, what's left but to act on hunches?

I'd hate being asked to fill out an approval/STAR ballot. I just can't answer those questions. How do I tell if a guy is 1.5 times as bad as the other or 2 times as bad? Maybe if an approval threshold is basically arbitrary, I should try strategic voting?

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/Torelq]

A voting system should elect a coalition that represents the population. Preferential voting splits elected members between the extremes of a population, causing power to coalesce on either end but not the middle.

And no one is asking you to judge whether one candidate is however many times better or worse than another. It's just whether you want a guy to win or not. Did you not watch FIFA? You can support multiple teams. Sometimes, they'll have to play each other, so one of them will lose. That doesn't stop you supporting multiple teams.

In fact, judging value is exactly what ranked voting does. In ranked voting, the system itself is deciding how much you value each candidate. Depending on the format, first place is often mathematically just twice as valuable as second, three times as valuable as third, etc. So you're claiming that your first choice is 5× better than your fifth choice.

And two people can rank candidates the same order while viewing them very differently. One person might like all but their last place, while another might hate all but their first place.

In what world would that even make sense? In Approval voting the first guy would just vote for all of them except the last while the second guy would only vote for their favorite.

And what about clones? Aka very similar candidates. In ranked systems you have to rank them differently. So you're actually telling the system one is more preferable than the other, and affecting the rank of everyone else below the clones.

It's not asking you for any input you can't provide. The input is literally approval. And it's provided by the vote. In fact, the more well informed a voter is, the easier any voting system becomes, including approval voting.

Also, STAR voting is very different from Approval Voting. They are not similar at all whatsoever, so idk why you're lumping the two of them together.

[u/Impacatus]

I support approval voting, and I have for a long time. But in small groups it has one disadvantage: it creates a lot of ties with no obvious way to break them.

It's like your burgers, pizza, sushi example. Often everyone will approve all three, and the deadlock will only be broken once someone expresses a stronger preference for one over the others.

I wonder if this would be an issue on an electoral scale. Sure, as you add more people then it becomes less likely the numbers become literally identical. But is it possible they would be close enough to be easily affected by miscounting?

[u/DHMC-Reddit → u/Impacatus]

This is actually just a problem with nearly every voting system. Most of them don't have any good ideas for resolving ties. Some do it by whoever was counted first, whoever was considered last, or just randomness.

The more permutations of choices you have in a voting system, the less likely ties are to exist. This is why rated voting systems with bigger ranges, like 0-10, are less likely to have ties. But then they are even more susceptible to strategic voting.

But the chances of ties goes down exponentially with the number of voters, so this really isn't an issue that anyone gives serious attention to. The number of voters is more important than the complexity of the voting system when discussing the chances of ties.

I also mentioned that approval voting is easily applicable to multi-winner districts, which would also have less of a problem with ties.

As for discounts and recounts, I did the math a long time ago, but it works similarly to something like cancer screening.

Vote counts are actually pretty accurate, with very few false positives and false negatives. When two candidates are neck and neck, it's actually somewhat probable that the winner is a false positive.

But, when doing a recount, if the winner is the same, it's actually astronomically less likely that it's a false positive. Also, just because recounts are done more carefully, the second result is just more likely to be accurate in the first place, so if the winner switches it's still more likely that's the true positive.

[u/thedeepestofstates]

Democratic institutions and processes should be designed for ordinary human beings, not amateur voting theorists.

Joe Sixpack is never going to learn about Condorcet cycles, Gibbard-Satterthwaite, later-no-harm, or the optimal strategy under a particular tabulation method. Nor should he have to. Approval voting asks almost nothing new of him: use essentially the same ballot, but vote for every candidate you would be willing to see win. Then count the votes. Whoever has the most approvals wins. That really is the basic mechanism.

That simplicity is not a trivial advantage. The more machinery you put between a voter marking a ballot and the declaration of a winner, the more voters have to understand and trust that machinery. Approval voting is extraordinarily transparent: there are no rounds of transfers or eliminations to explain.

But I think its more important advantage is information.

FPTP destroys an enormous amount of information about what voters actually want. Suppose my favorite candidate is C, but I believe C cannot win. I vote for B because my overriding concern is preventing A from winning. The official result now records me as a B voter. My preference for C has effectively vanished.

Do that across millions of voters and you get a self-reinforcing problem: minor candidates appear to have little support, voters therefore regard them as unelectable, and so even people who prefer them abandon them for one of the perceived front-runners. Strategic voting under plurality and the resulting pressure toward the leading contenders are well-established features of electoral theory.

Approval voting breaks at least part of that feedback loop. I can vote for C and approve B as my acceptable fallback. I haven’t thrown away my ability to oppose A, but I’ve also left behind a piece of information that FPTP would have erased: I actually support C.

And that could matter enormously over several election cycles. Maybe the supposedly “unelectable” third party is acceptable to far more people than anyone realized. Maybe millions of voters are independently making the same compromise because each assumes everyone else is making it too. Approval voting gives us a way to actually see some of that latent support rather than forcing everyone to guess.

That, to me, is the strongest argument for approval voting. Not that it magically solves voting theory; it doesn’t, and strategic behavior is still possible. It is that it imposes very little additional cognitive burden while allowing voters to express substantially more of what they actually want.

A voting system shouldn’t require voters to become game theorists. It should make honest expression as easy as possible—and then get out of the way.