However, it seems to me that majority is just one form of consensus.
Max approval is another form.
Consider (sincere)
52 A>B>>C 48 B>C>>A
Candidate B is the max approval candidate.
Candidate A is the majority candidate.
Which is the "consensus" winner?
I maintain that if the voters had to reach a consensus, as jurors are required to do on important cases, and as cohousing shareholders require for important community decisions, that B would be the more likely consensus candidate.
I believe that in a system that has caulked up all of the trickle down leaks the democratic ideal of relative equality is better served by the alternative that the most find acceptable, than the option that the bare majority considers best and the rest find intolerable.
In my opinion, the sincere approval winner is usually better for society than the sincere Condorcet Winner when the two are different.
But both of these are elusive candidates because of insincere ballots.
Furthermore, I think that unless both the Approval Winner and the Condorcet Winner have chances of winning, there will usually be some incentive to vote insincerely.
In the above scenario if the CW candidate A is given no chance of winning, then A supporters will move B below the approval cutoff, even though they consider A only slightly better than B, whom they consider perfectly acceptable.
In another example (sincere)
45 A>>C>B 30 B>>C>A 25 C>A>>B
unless the approval winner A is given some chance of winning, the first faction will reverse the C>B preference and create a cycle that any reasonable Condorcet method would give to A.
It doesn't bother me that Least Additional Votes sometimes picks outside Smith. So does Approval, and it is one of the best possible public proposals.
In Approval voter strategizing (when not misled by disinformation) tends to get winners from the Smith set.
I suspect the same would happen with Least Additional Votes.
Least Additional Votes (like Approval) has the advantage (over many other methods) of being able to tell the losers by how many votes they missed winning the election.
Forest ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
