Voting Theory: Approval Voting

This video explains how to apply the approval voting method to determine the winner of an election.
Site: mathispower4u.com
Content Source: www.opentextbookstore.com/math...

[@vegahimsa3057]

Approval voting never offers a strategic incentive to betray a sincere favorite. It only offers a strategic consideration of "where to draw the line" or "how many" to include in the approved set. What AV may lack in expressive distinction is more than compensated with incentivized sincerity.

[@Mathispower4u]

Thanks for the comment. Counting just first choice votes, A has 39/50. This is a majority. However, B wins.

[@jorgeezy]

My gratitude for the time and effort put into your videos, they have significantly aided in my learning of voting theory :)

[@michaelnelson1270]

Approval voting may be theoretically inferior to say STV, but it is simple enough for an average voter and could mostly use the equipment we have now. It is a vast improvement over plurality, and might actually get enacted, while more complex ranked choice methods will not be enacted in the USA in the foreseeable future.

[@michaelnelson1270]

Also, having seen recent US elections, can you say choosing the least disliked candidate is a bad thing?

[@puralumbrefest]

In 2nd example C would be winner with 35 votes and A would have 17 while B would have 16 if each vote was split when more than one candidate is chosen

[@laurakondrick1635]

what does "least disliked" mean in approval voting.

[@vegahimsa3057]

"Majority Fairness Criterion" is also known as "Tyranny of the Majority". B may be a boring centrist, but B is universally acceptable. Candidate A might be a bigot, or in any case, is explicitly unacceptable to a large minority. I believe restaurants are the best example that allows us to sincerely empathize with "opponent" preferences. We should not want an adversarial election system (else perhaps civil war and disunion are preferable to consensus democracy). It's entirely possible that voters have strong dislikes and multiple acceptable choices. Likewise candidates should try to appeal widely, and not to a fanatical (love-hate) minority.

[@michaelnelson1270]

Exactly. In American politics, "least disliked" is actually a quite good selection criterion.

[@dastardlydan4022]

So what if you had two types of votes when you went to vote? One vote is for your favourite candidate, we'll call that the main vote. Then the other type of vote is just an approval vote, which you can use on any number of other candidates. If there is a majority among the main votes, that person wins, but if there isn't, then the main and approval votes are all added up and whoever has the most of that wins. Edit: no that wouldn't work because then the main vote would just be strategized over...

[@cleverdusty]

Thanks for talking about this. Most people i know aren't even aware there are other ways to vote. They don't understand there are pro's and con's. We need to continue talking about voting systems and educating the pubic that this discussion is going on. I hope soon we settle on a new voting system int the US that satisfies our highly suspicious public.

[@mprocope]

Nice video! I just don't get what you're trying to show with the last example. First, D was the winner with 71 approval votes and A was second with 70. Then 3 voters remove only their approval for D. So A wins. Why is the drawback of approval voting in this case?

[@alanivar2752]

there's nothing to show. it's just bad propaganda

[@user-uj6tc4pj1x]

This is an old post, but just to be clear. Why might this be a drawback? It erases much of the benefit of approval voting. Imagine it in concrete terms. Suppose A is a Democrat, B is a Republican, C is Libertarian, and D is Independent (or switch them if you want). If A convinces voters not to approve of D, even those who approve of D, that election winner might be A, who fails to represent as many supporters of B, C, or D. In other words, strategic voting costs everyone the benefit that approval voting means to deliver: the broadest consensus candidates. That suggests, in the most partisan areas, approval voting may not prevent or even erode partisanship and address large minorities without representation.

[@veggiet2009]

I'm glad you brought up the negatives of this system. I really don't see how "approval voting" is susceptible to strategic voting. As I understand strategic voting, it is to artificially adjust your ballot to influence an election in a different way. IRV or alternative voting is perhaps most susceptible to this, because there are occasions in IRV where putting your favourite candidate 2nd will actually cause him to win, and campaigning for your party to get extra 1st votes can cause the candidate to paradoxically lose. This is an artificial scenario that also affects plurality. But with approval voting I don't see how three people removing support for D artificially influence the election. It causes D to lose plane and simple, which was an expected outcome of anyone withdrawing support, now if removing 3 votes from D somehow caused D to win, then that seems artificial. In Plurality you can trick a win in your election by drawing voters to a third party causing a lesser favoured candidate to win, this I think would be classified as strategic voting (or strategic campaigning) in Approval voting if r were to "artificially" introduce a third party candidate, it wouldn't necessarily draw support away from the main candidate, unless they were insincere. I do agree with you about insincerity, but again looking at the other forms of voting I think insincerity would affect the election about the same in each form, but we can't necessarily judge mig election based on intentions, or we might introduce a 3 month later "buyers remorse" election to give voters the opportunity to "undo" their choice, lol.

[@PoochieCollins]

Yeah, he seems wrong about gaming approval voting for the reasons you give. He's right about how a particularly beloved candidate could end up losing, though. For instance, in the middle example he gave, if you scored 2 points for first place votes, 1 for second, and 0 for last, A would have 78 points, B has 24, and C has 14, but B won in his example despite that you could probably argue that A was far more popular than the other two. Ranged voting might mostly fix this. I also like the idea of being able to cast both a vote and anti-vote. +Mathispower4u

[@vegahimsa3057]

Approval voting + 0 is surprisingly (unexpectedly) more expressive than + 0 - and provides fewer (nearly eliminates) insincere strategic incentive. What the video calls Majority Fairness is also known as Tyranny of the Majority. In the example, A is very likely a bigot and explicitly hated by (or who hates) a large minority. Whereas as B has universal approval. It's difficult to call any alternative a democracy.

[@sudhisira]

Where did the 24, 21, etc. voter numbers come from? This almost looks like Part 2 of the tutorial. Where is Part 1 then?

[@beginadobe]

First of all, thanks a lot for putting the effort to make this series. However, I think you have misunderstood approval voting. There are no rankings in approval voting, you just have to mark the candidates that you approve (in no order). And the issues you brought up about this system are also not correct: 1. Keeping in mind that there are no orders in approval voting, in example 3, we see that all voters have approved all the candidates! I guess you were aware of that and that's why you only looked at the first two rows. and Again if we remove the notion of ranking, B has the majority of approvals and is fairly the winner. 2. In the last example, what you brought up is not strategic voting, because those 3 voters had the chance to approve both A and D but chose to no approve D. Strategic voting takes place when you don't have the opportunity to vote equally for two or more different candidates, which is not the case with approval voting. Again thanks a lot for these videos, really helpful.

[@beginadobe]

I would say the major issue with this system is that it doesn't really support political diversity because people will always approve the major parties to make sure the other major parties don't win. So the major parties get all their votes and minorities will also get their votes, but the minorities will never get the chance to win. Maybe this could actually be an interpretation of strategic voting in this system.

[@beginadobe]

Actually, you were right about the chance of a party with less than majority winning the election. It was only your example that wasn't correct.

[@spruce_goose5169]

You've misunderstood the video. He is showing rankings to provide an example of how approval voting can elect the 'least disliked candidate.'

[@vegahimsa3057]

What the video calls Majority Fairness is also known as Tyranny of the Majority. In the example, A is very likely a bigot and explicitly disliked by (or who dislikes) a large minority. Whereas B has universal approval. It's difficult to call any alternative a democracy.

[@djpolo99]

It doesn't make sense to include ranked choice preferences @3:04 as an example. All of the candidates received the same amount of APPROVALS in that example. LOL

[@spruce_goose5169]

He's simply providing an example of how approval voting, as a system, can elect the "least disliked candidate." How would you show that without assigning rankings? Approval voting as a system doesn't consider rankings, but the voters likely still have preferences. Hence the disclaimer "if we assume the voters first two choices are considered approved."

[@alanivar2752]

thats literally the exact opposite of strategic voting

[@xezzee]

You didn't finish the last part. What if those two people who voted A and D voted only D? Then B would win!

[@senseforsale]

Your example doesn't actually demonstrate a majority criterion violation. The majority criterion applies when a method fails to select a winner that has greater than 50% of first-choice votes. The sample provided showed a candidate with a mere 39% plurality of first-choice votes. As for the outcome, 61% preferred B over A. And Approval Voting chose B over A. It's hard to see this outcome as "what is wrong with Approval Voting." Your videos have a clear visual, by the way. They look nice.

[@vegahimsa3057]

What the video calls Majority Fairness is also known as Tyranny of the Majority. In the example, A is very likely a bigot and explicitly disliked by (or who dislikes) a large minority. Whereas B has universal approval. It's difficult to call any alternative a democracy.

[@puralumbrefest]

Third example shows A would beat B in rcv and in approval A would win not B because the choices are repeating B's votes three times

[@OrenLikes]

"Strategic voting" does not affect approval voting the more voters there are - try with 250 million voters, or, even one thousand, and see how many have to be "strategic"...

[@alanivar2752]

'What is wrong with Approval Voting?' Proceeds to demonstrate one of Approval Voting's greatest strength.

[@twizz_shi1673]

yea Boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

[@csjmiller]

You seem to have a misunderstanding of how approval voting works...

[@Crazy123Flame]

Please explain more - how is he misunderstood? I am curious.

[@csjmiller]

@@Crazy123Flame the way approval voting works is you approve of any of the candidates in any variation of the way...for example one could approve of howie hawkins and Jo Jorgensen but not approve of trump or biden...the thing that sets approval voting apart from ranked choice (which this video describes) is your choice for one candidate is irrelevant to your choice of any other candidate...in ranked choice you literally rank your choices from first to last meaning you can't pick 2 first place and 2 last place...in approval voting each candidate is literally in a race by themselves until the final percentages are compared...this video describes ranked choice not approval voting

[@vegahimsa3057]

He's just demonstrating how Approval Voting works given an example voters' sincere preferrences. "Imagine voters would rank candidates thusly and imagine they approve exactly and only two". Yes, it's contrived and does not demonstrate expression, but it does help one compare Plurality and ranked voting against Approval voting with a single simple example.

[@csjmiller]

@@vegahimsa3057 no...he's demonstrating ranked choice voting NOT approval voting...there is a major difference

[@vegahimsa3057]

@@csjmiller without bothering to watch the video again, as I remember, the point of the video was to give you, the viewer, an understanding of the different systems. So, he's taking the same exactly voters with the same exact sincere preferences and showing how they might have voted in different systems and how the results might have differed between the systems. It's very reasonable (but not necessary) that if a bunch of people ranked candidates, they might approve of their top two ranked candidates. When I demonstrate more complex and more realistic scenarios, fundamentally I've gotta do a similar thing, to convey any meaning to an audience. I might create a dozen voter personas and several candidates (or real examples from a real election) then present all voters' sincere candidate scores. Then describe how each voter would sincerely vote in different systems. Then describe how each voter might strategize and why. Approval voters may use different strategies, but generally reflects their sincere scoring, but the cutoff threshold is most often the most significant consideration. Anyway, ranked-choice strategies are necessary, yet convoluted, and often backfire. However, when stimulating approval voters' choices, it's nearly always some cutoff of their sincere score (fx "Bob approves of all candidates that he sincerely scored above 75%"). The video didn't show the sincere scoring (it should have) and just assumed we could predict approval from ranking. It was roughly a 3x3 example. It was just about as simple as it could have been.

[@OrenLikes]

3:03 bad example of "What is wrong with approval voting" - all voters approved all candidates...

[@bjrnvegartorseth9028]

I think this analysis is fundamentally flawed by introducing a concept of ranking candidate preference when this does not exist in approval voting. If you approve of multiple candidates, you approve of them equally. If the preference gap between candidates is very large for you, then you wouldn't give approval to other candidates. The "least disliked" example isn't even approval voting, it's ranked voting.