On Dec 7, 2007, at 6:54 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > Approval, however, fixes the spoiler effect. The effect we are so > unfortunately familiar with takes place when a candidate with no > chance of winning the election flips the result from one party in our > two-party system to the other. In such a context, if voting for > multiple candidates is allowed (in a single-winner election), most > voters, I would predict, vote only for their favorite. *By > definition, most voters' favorite is one of the two frontrunners.* > Now, when only two candidates are in range of winning, votes for > other candidates are essentially moot for victory purposes. So for > this alleged "harm" to take place, the voter must be considering > voting for both frontrunners. Like voting for Bush and Gore in 2000.
Florida 2000 would presumably have been "fixed" by a wide variety of alternative voting schemes, including approval, IRV, and even two- person runoff. Approval fixes Florida 2000 nicely, though, only because Nader had no serious chance of election, so a Nader voter wouldn't have hurt Nader's chances (zero) by approving Gore as well. In a different election profile, though, an approval voter faced with a "good-bad-worse" choice where all three candidates are viable is forced to strategize. Having approved "good", my approval of "bad" could be decisive in bad beating good--which leads me to prefer later- no-harm methods: I want to be able to both express my preference for "good" over "bad", and at the same time "bad" over "worse". I can't do that with approval. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info