One reason I went ahead and formulated the Marginal Ranked Approval Voting page was to illustrate a method that is biased toward higher approval.
http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Marginal_Ranked_Approval_Voting The problem with this method, when compared to DMC, is that it gives higher-approved candidates too much of an advantage. The long term game theory effect of MRAV's bias toward higher-approved candidates is that voters will give less approval to non-favorite candidates. Forest made a comment a few weeks ago about an irritating former contributor to the list, Donald Davidson: http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2002-February/007310.html One of his statements (no longer on the web, apparently his web site is gone) was he didn't care what method was used, it would eventually evolve into IRV. Well, that has a kernel of truth to it -- candidates are going to try to game the system, whatever it is. So whatever method you set up, it needs to have a certain unpredictable aspect to it, even (or especially) if it is deterministic, so voters will give up and simply state their true preferences. I set up the MRAV rules to emulate Approval Sorted Margins, but I might try fiddling with the rules a bit to allow a strongly defeated candidate to win. Forest said something to this effect a couple of weeks back, when he mentioned that he was toying with the idea of letting any candidate with a beatpath to the Approval Winner be part of the random-ballot lottery. Ted -- araucaria dot araucana at gmail dot com ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info