Hello all,
The way I see it, the kind of person willing to be an early-adopter is the kind of person with gumption. They're willing to deal with uncertainty, they're willing to stake out a claim based on principles, they're willing to put in a little extra work where it's needed.
Alight, maybe, maybe not.
But if that sounds like you, I want to recruit you to lead a referendum to switch Ohio or a local government in Ohio to Approval Voting.
If you haven't heard of Approval Voting before, here it is:
- Vote for everyone you like.
- Most votes wins.
That's it.
But OH BOY does it fix a lot of problems. Under Approval, it's always safe to vote for your favorite candidate. With Approval, you can't submit an invalid ballot. And best of all, Approval voting doesn't have spoilers.
Approval Voting helps show how much support every candidate in the race actually has, since there was nothing stopping anyone from voting for them. Everyone's final total represents their approval rating!
If this sounds like a good deal to you, let me know and we can talk about what it would take to switch your elections to approval. If you have any questions, fire away! I'm even perfectly happy to tell you what kinds of problems and limitations approval has, because all voting systems have problems and limitations!
P.S. I couldn't find any community specific rules and I'm not sure if this counts as advertising or spam per the site rules but if it does let me know and I'll delete the post.
P.P.S. I do actually live in Ohio, I'm not gonna go around recruiting people for projects in a state where I don't live.
Thanks for the detailed writeup.
I think my main concern with approval is specifically the lack of ranking, as it feels weird to essentially equally weight selections when in my preference they are definitely not equally acceptable.
Yup! That's the common complaint, and it's also the reason it falls "later no harm." It's essentially a balancing act between being able to say everything you want, without encouraging voters to cast "safety votes" for candidates they don't like at all.
You can get around this problem by going to Score or Star but now you're adding complexity for not very much gain, if any. Both are looked at, here, which I think I already shared but I'm just pointing to it again. Since even the most disinterested person needs to be able to understand the voting system, I think the extra complexity isn't worth the extra expression.
The biggest need for everyone to understand the voting system is not so that they, as individuals, know what they're doing, but so that candidates can't claim the system was rigged somehow. Yes, bad actors will make that claim anyway, but if the system is too complex for some people to understand, that argument becomes a lot more persuasive.
"It's rigged!"
That voting system is so complicated even i don't understand it, it really could be rigged!
You would probably prefer STAR Voting, or a Condorcet variant of RCV, like Ranked Robin or Total Vote Runoff.
They have the more expressive ballots of Hare RCV without carrying over the flaws of FPTP.