Dave Ketchum wrote: > I claim that approval is both weak enough for many of these to notice, > and more difficult than its backers are willing to admit: > Weak because, if I approve of two candidates, I CANNOT indicate my > preference between them.
I cannot buy the notion that this is a real disadvantage. Is being required to choose between approving one candidate, vs. expressing a preference for another candidate over that candidate, really an unacceptable burden to impose on voters? If you believe it is, can you tell me why? Preferences that are expressed in Approval tend to be strongly held preferences, while preferences that are expressed in ranked ballots are of unknown strength (and sometime negative strength, particularly in non-Condorcet methods such as IRV and Borda). Thus, the voters may end up with a CW who is favored by a majority of voters to all other candidates, but who doesn't have any voters that have a strong preference for that candidate over their next choice. When the CW and the AW (Approval Winner) are different, the better choice is probably the AW, since it is likely that, for the majority that prefer the CW to the AW (as indicated on rank ballots), that preference is a weak one -- otherwise that preference would be expressed in the Approval vote as well. For the minority who approved the AW without approving the CW, this was more likely to be a strong preference. Approval does sacrifice individual expressivity in order to gain group expressivity, but after all when we hold a public election we are trying to make a social choice, not a private choice. If it's individual expressivity you want, then Cardinal Ratings are for you. You'd be perfectly free to sacrifice instrumental voting power to make a more exact statement about your evaluation of the candidates' merits. > More difficult because where, in the scale between like and > dislike, is the point where I should stop approving candidates? If you are unable to decide whether to approve or disapprove some candidate, because that candidate is somewhere close to the strategic borderline between approval and disapproval, then the strategic value of your vote for that candidate is close to zero (relative to your strategic values for the high- and low-utility candidates). Therefore the strategic cost of making the wrong choice on this particular candidate is very low. -- Richard ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em