Hi, I am Mrprasad. I originally added the section "Condorcet Criterion Issue" a few days ago (i.e. 1-31-06; today is 2-3-06). A reader informed me that he was concerned that its use of the term "greatest possible consensus" was POV. I understood that concern and want to edit it in a manner that gets around this issue. However, I have not had the time to search for the necessary sources to back the claims. I do not feel I can rewrite the section without some reference to "greatest possible consensus". Thus, I feel the need to drop the section until I can better source the section. I will return it once I do that.

It is easily reversed as disapproval voting where a choice is disavowed, as is already required in other measures in politics (e.g. representative recall).

I don't see why approval voting is any different than any other system for "disapproval". The case cited (representative recall) is not even a single-winner contest. (throw all the bums out :-). It is a single-candidate contest if anything.... I propose dropping that text. NealMcB 18:10, 2004 Apr 29 (UTC)

Reads well now. The point about approval and preference voting both being single-vote systems is now there, but no hierarchy of 'this is a type of that' is anywhere in the descriptions of the voting systems themselves, which is fine, except for disapproval as a variant of approval, which seems the only clear inverse. 15:02, 2003 Jan 17

There was an earlier article here once, but it must have been censored.

Under Approval_voting#Potential_for_Tactical_voting I don't like this statement:

A good strategy is to vote for every candidate the voter prefers to the leading candidate, and to also vote for the leading candidate if he is preferred to the current second-place candidate. When all voters follow this strategy, the Condorcet winner is almost certain to win.

It is an opinion statement and I don't know what qualifications should be made for it. Who says this is a good strategy? How do we measure the "leading candidate"? Is that an approval measure or a plurality measure?!

I've done my own thoughts on Approval Voting and I judge:

A good strategy is to vote for the same candidate you would vote for in a plurality race, and also any candidates you prefer more (ignoring any assumption that those candidates can't win).

thus reducing the problem to the IMO harder one of deciding whom to vote for in plurality. --Townmouse 19:48, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This stategy is more practical, and is MUCH more likely to be used, even if it doesn't help the Condorcet Winner.

It would merely allow weak candidates a fair measure of support (approval) without throwing the election against a preferred stronger candidate. Approval offers little to voters in a strong three-way race when the top leader is not predictable. Then approval is only useful as a maximal power "negative vote" against feared competitor(s). (Voting A=1,B=1,C=0 in approval is mathematically equivalent to A=0,B=0,C=-1)

I won't change anything for now, but I appreciate opinions. I accept the existing "good strategy" statement as "Good strategy to elect a Condorcet Winner".

Does anyone else have a problem with the existing "good strategy" statement? Any suggestions for changes?

Thanks! --Tomruen 00:02, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The problem with your phrase is that the vote in a tactical vote in a plurality race may also depend on identifying the leading candidates in a plurality race, the leading candidates may be different under different rules and the information may not be avialable on how others might vote in a plurality race. For those who wish to vote in a way which is unlikely to affect the result, tactical voting advice is unnecessary, and I think the current text makes reasonable sense - the leading candidate obviously means in an approval measure. --Henrygb 23:16, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hmmm... my first assumption was "leading candidate" meant leading in a single-vote count since it is pretty much meaningless to poll voters with approval votes in a poll. Approval polling is too strongly open to manipulation, even unorganized manipulation - individuals playing around for fun or profit. I accept the same argument exists with single-vote counts, but people still want their true favorite to poll well and are less likely to play unless they really have no preference. --Tom Ruen 05:37, Jun 27, 2004 (UTC)

Surely a "good strategy" is a strategy that maximises that particular voter's expected utility. For a single-winner election that means one that maximises how much the voter likes the ultimate winner.

My question is why approval voting is single winner only. Is it called something else when the top n candidates are elected? --Henrygb 23:16, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Approval certainly could be used for multiwinner elections and doesn't have or need any different name. In practice there's less reason to need it. The "standard" multiwinner election method is called Plurality-at-large or Bloc-voting which allows as many votes as candidates. It's less often people would want to "overvote" with multiple winners except as a defensive vote against one or more most disliked candidates. A more likely vote in plurality-at-large is voting for less candidates than winners because you don't want your lower choices to defeat higher ones.

Actually multiwinner Approval elections are an attractive idea - but only when candidates are truly evaluated independently - that is if the number of winners can be variable and the approval rating needed is fixed before the election.

For example a great application would be a poll for which ALL candidates with more than 15% approval are included in a presidential debate. That's a very valid poll since you know the more you vote for the more winners there will be and your vote for a second favorite CAN'T hurt the chances of winning for a first favorite. --Tom Ruen 05:37, Jun 27, 2004 (UTC)

Some thoughts:

• If Approval Voting had been in force in Florida 2000, then the mistakenly double marked ballots (for Gore and Buchanan) would still have counted. No votes would have been voided. Gore would have got all his genuine votes, while Buchanan was so far behind it would not have mattered it he got some bonus or unintended approval votes.

• Does Approval Voting comply with "one man one vote"? Yes it does, because any Buchanan votes do not really matter because he was so far behind, and Gore only ever recieves "one useful vote per voter".

• Has Approval Voting ever actually been used anywhere?

• The biggest disadvantage of Approval Voting may be that it distorts the election statistics - the total number of votes may appear to add up to more than 100%. Something would need to be done to "normalise" the results.

• If the votes in an Approval Vote contest add up to more than 100% turnout, how does convince the public that the election has not be tampered with? That might be a hard sell!

• If 999 Nader voters had approved of Gore, Gore would have beaten Bush.
• If 999 Buchanan voters had also approved of Bush, Bush would still have won.
• Note that there were 3rd Party candidates spoiling things on both sides.

Syd1435 09:23, 2004 Oct 4 (UTC)

Suppose one side of politics is a permanent Coalition, say City Republicans and Rural Republicans, and an election is being held using Approval Voting.

• If you do not mind which kind of Republican gets in, you approve of both kinds.

• But say for some reason or another, you would much prefer the Rural Republican to get elected - how then do you fill in your Ballot?

• Answer, you must approve of the RR candidate and disapprove of the CR candidate.

• Suppose there are other voters who prefer the City Republican candidate.

• Taken together, the two Republican candidates will lose a few votes compared to the sole Democratic candidate.

• There is thus a dangerous split in the Republican camp, albeit a modest one.

• This illustrates a flaw in Approval Voting, because all approvals have the same value, when in practice, some variation in the approval rating is desirable.

What is needed is some kind of intermediate approval level. Here is a sample ballot paper, to enable both Republicans to be approved, but with one preferred to the other. Then all Republican votes count toward beating the common enemy.

• [3] Joe Smith ----- Greens.
• [1] Henry Ford ---- Rural Republican
• [3] Jane Doe ------ Democrat
• [3] Fred Rubble --- Reform
• [2] Mary Hill ----- City Republican

Notes:

• [1] = 1st preference Approval (YES-FULL)
• [2] = 2nd preference Approval (YES-PART)
• [3] = Disapproval............ (NO)

Note that the Modified Approval Voting with variable levels of preference is starting to look like Instant Runoff Voting.

Put this the other way, Approval Voting is a restictive version of Instant Runoff Voting where instead of having N different ranks for N candidates, you are restricted to 2 different ranks for N candidates.

Hi Syd1435,

I'm moving your discussion of Approval voting's flaws to the talk page for two reasons (1) because it really looks like you're actively trying to plug IRV [instead of dispassionately describing the flaws in AppV] (2) the tone of the content is really a lot more conversational than it is encyclopedic. Let's work together to bring the most useful content from your contributions back to the article. Best, -- Kowey 08:55, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

P.S. I will confess that I am partial to AppV myself, so we should also get help from a more neutral 3rd party.

Since AV is also an abbreviation for Alternate Vote aka IRV, can we abbreviate Approval Voting as AppV?

I think it helps to compare FPTP, AppV and AltV aka IRV rather than dealt with them dispassionately on their own.

BTW, the 9 Oct Election is very exciting because preferential voting (IRV), slow absentee and postal ballots, mean that unexpected and interesting results are occurring. No point in having it all over on election night.

I am happy to work with you to get something acceptable back of article page.

Syd1435 12:10, 2004 Oct 16 (UTC)

• In an Approval Vote election, the total number of approvals will add up to more than 100% of the number of voters, which may appear to some people as a breech of the "One Man One Vote" principle. It is not a breech, but how does one argue that it is not a breech?

• Suppose that a voter approves of candidates B and C; but approves of candidate B more than C. How does he cast his votes?
  • If he approves of only B, the lack of an approval vote for C may let A in.
  • If he approves of both B and C, then he has failed to express his preference for B over C.
  • It is thus impossible to simultaneously approve of two candidates which preferring one over the other.
  • Approval voting suffers the disadvantage that all approvals are of equal weight, even when the vote wishes to express unequal approvals.

• These two problems are resolved with Instant Runoff Voting.
  • With IRV, the total number of votes for each candidate at every stage of the count equals the number of votes orignally cast.
  • If a votes put B first, C second and A third, then the full value of his vote is set against B in the first round. Depending on how B and C score against eachother, either the second preferences of C go to B, or the second preferences of B go to C. No votes need be lost in the struggle between like minded B and C against the common enemy A.
  • In military terms, there is no "Division of Force" when a voter preferences B before C. No matter whether a votes remains with its original choice, or is redistributed to a lower choice, that vote always retains its full value, one man, one vote, one value.

• There is a problem with Instant Runoff Voting that in practice is no longer a problem.
  • With Approval Voting, Limited Voting, and the like, when a computer is used to tally the results, only the total score for each candidate need be recorded. This requires only a small Commodure 64 computer with 64k of memory.
  • With Instant Runoff Voting, it is necessary to store an image of every ballot; it there are N ballots, and M candidates per ballot, then a Pentium computer with N * M bytes or even double bytes of memory is required.
  • It can also be represented with much less memory. Just as the example above represented many voters with just four columns, you can get my with just counting how many ef each *unique* ballot exists. You only need M * (M!) entries, each entry able to count up to N. For M=4 candidates, this comes to 96 entries. For M=10 candidates, this comes to about 36 mega-entries.
  • If Department of Elections only has Commodore 64 computers at its disposal, then a computerised IRV may be out of the question.
  • A computerised count of and IRV election would also take much more time to process than an Approval Voting election.
  • How many people still use Commodore 64 computers?

I would like to point out that IRV can also be exploited through tactical voting whenever the Voting paradox applies. No ranked method is immune to the Voting paradox. Paladinwannabe2 19:56, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Citizens for Approval Voting website uses the following ballot paper as its logo:

• • [YES] Jefferson - a great president
  • [NO ] Stalin - a tyrant
  • [YES] Madison - a great president
  • [YES] Washington - a great president

Clearly, it does not matter which of these three great presidents wins, so long as Stalin loses.

But suppose the ballot was revised as follows:

• • [YES] Jefferson - a great president
  • [NO ] Stalin - a tyrant
  • [YES] Madison - a great president
  • [ ? ] Warren G. Harding - a ROTTEN president

Now the choice is less clear. We would want even Warren G. Harding to beat Stalin, but either Jefferson or Madison to beat Harding. This example shows a fundimental weakness of Approval Voting. Cumulative Voting does better, and Instant Runoff Voting better still.

Put simply, Approval Voting cannot simultaneously approve of multiple candidates and choose between them.

An even more telling ballot would be to place Stalin against the three worst presidents.

Strategic or Tactical Voting occurs when a voter judges that their preferred candidate is not likely to win, and that therefore they are better off voting for a lesser of two evils candidate.

With FPTP, this can occur with three cornered contests. An unexpected third candiate can drain away enough votes to spoil victory for one of the leaders.

With Approval Voting, the drainage of votes is certain to be much less, since a voter can select both the original choice, as well as the lesser of two evils choice.

If however, the vote judges than their preferred candidate has a winning chance, they may decline to approve of the lesser of two evils choice, making room for the worst of two evils to get in, if they miscalculate. This could be gut-wrenching. Some voters will thus only approve of the preferred candidate and decline to support the lesser of two evils candidate, casting a FPTP like ballot.

With Instant Runoff Voting, the voter ranks their first choice first, the lesser of two evils candidate second, and the worst of all evils last. No combination or permutation of preferences can help elect the worst of all evils, assuming that the voter ranks all candidates. The need not be any leakage of preference that might spoil the result as a PFTP vote can do, or a AppV vote does to some extend.

When an IRV ballot is filled in, with all the candidates ranked consequtively from 1 to N, there can be no circular preferences, (A>B, B>C, C>A). Preferences always flow unambiguously D>A>E>B>C, etc.

With AppV ballot there are no circular rankings, but there are ambiguous rankings say (A=D=E)>(B=C).

With FPTP ballot, there are no circular rankings because say D>(A=B=C=E).

What is this ranking circularity called - Concordat blah blah???

Syd1435 11:48, 2004 Oct 16 (UTC)

Syd1435, please read the writeup on Instant Runoff Voting as well as the writeup on Condorcet method for an explanation of IRV's flaws, and a demonstration of why IRV has major tactical voting problems when a third party candidate reaches a level of popularity where it is possible that they could be elected. The point to take home here is that approval voting isn't perfect, but it is better than first past the post, and a good first step towards a true Condorcet method for elections. Instead of Instant Runoff Voting, perhaps you would approve of a ranked choice ballot, counted with Condorcet method? McCart42 20:49, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)

Abd 15:57, 20 December 2006 (UTC): I deleted the following section:[reply]

The mathematics of approval voting lend it to some manipulation and tactical voting. As each vote counts as one vote and the winner is the one with the highest total, each vote equally helps the candidate/issue (city in this example) selected win. Because of this, voters are more likely to only vote for their favorite. Because Approval voting has not been used much for real elections, this phenomenon is not well documented.

The reason is that it is redundant, where it is accurate, and POV where it is not. Specifically, the paragraph claims that, with Approval, voters are more likely to only vote for their favorite. (1) this is speculative and clearly POV. (2) It is highly unlikely to be true. Some voters will do this, for sure, but others, and especially the supporters of third party candidates, will follow what has been recommended as a standard Approval strategy: vote for your favorite(s), vote for your favorites among the leading contenders whom those you think have a shot at winning, and vote for any candidate you prefer to a favorite leading candidate.

Further, many voters who have a favorite who is a leading contender may well also vote for a candidate whom they wish to encourage in some way. So, for example, a Democrat might also cast a vote for a Green candidate in order to indicate support for more liberal policies, thus possibly encouraging the Democratic Party to move in that direction.

In addition, the statement uses "more" without any reference to what is being compared to Approval. Abd 15:57, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Like any Preferential voting system, IRV can be exploited through tactical voting. given the classic example of

7 voters prefer A > B > C

6 voters prefer B > C > A

5 voters prefer C > A > B

A would normally win in an Instant Runoff election. However, if 3 voters who preferred B marked down (C>B>A) on their ballot, then C would win the election instead- so by changing their vote, B's supporters have kept their worst-case candidate form being elected. Paladinwannabe2 20:15, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Approval Voting can be converted into a form of Instant Runoff Voting by replacing YES with "1" and NO with "2"

• [2] Joe Smith ----- Greens.
• [1] Henry Ford ---- Rural Republican
• [2] Jane Doe ------ Democrat
• [2] Fred Rubble --- Reform
• [1] Mary Hill ----- City Republican

Note how the numbers "1" and "2" are repeated.

If a voter desires to preference Ford ahead of Hill, while supporting both these Republicans against all others, then that voter would need to use the numbers "1", "2" and "3".

This "1" = "FULL YES", "2" = "PART YES", "3" = "NO"

• [3] Joe Smith ----- Greens.
• [1] Henry Ford ---- Rural Republican
• [3] Jane Doe ------ Democrat
• [3] Fred Rubble --- Reform
• [2] Mary Hill ----- City Republican

It would not be Rocket Science to devise a (computerised) system to allow a voter to use either Approval Voting or Instant Runoff Voting in the same election.

• [3] Joe Smith ----- Greens.
• [1] Henry Ford ---- Rural Republican
• [4] Jane Doe ------ Democrat
• [5] Fred Rubble --- Reform
• [2] Mary Hill ----- City Republican

A convential Instant Runoff Voting requires each square to be filled in by different consequtive numbers, which helps the electoral officials check for errors.

Approval voting can be extended to multiple winner elections, either as block approval voting, a simple variant on block voting where each voter can select an unlimited number of candidates and the candidates with the most approval votes win, or as proportional approval voting which seeks to maximise the overall satisfaction with the final result using approval voting.

A disadvantage of multiple winner voting, is that if there are N vacancies, voters must vote for N candidates, which is like N First Past the Post votes in parallel. The result if often a clean sweep by one major party or the other.

Limited Voting allows each voter M votes for N vacancies, where M < N, which reduces the likely of a clean sweep.

Cumulative Voting allows each voter M votes for N vacancies, where M <= N, but the voter can allocate those votes 1 each for M candidates or M votes for just 1 candidate, or something in between.

AV is an abbreviation of "Alternate Vote aka IRV" as well as Approval Voting. Can something be done to disambiguate this, by say calling Approval Voting AppV?

Syd1435 10:56, 2004 Oct 16 (UTC)

The link to "The Science of Elections" requires a subscription. Is there a summary anywhere that can be viewed freely? --Townmouse 19:48, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In contentious elections with a super-majority of voters who prefer their favorite candidate vastly over all others

Why do you want to use the term "super-majority" here? The old text said "full of." If you don't like that, then how about "many"? KVenzke 19:01, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

This post from the Election-methods mailing list in October 2004 is a response to the Center for Voting and Democracy's letter in support of instant-runoff voting over approval voting. It contains many good points on the nature of fairness in electoral methods. - McCart42 (talk) 04:11, 15 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not too happy with how the Tenessee example is elaborated in the article page, in particular the sentence that ticks off the elaboration of that example:

Supposing that voters voted for their two favorite candidates, [...]

While that's typically not the kind of simplification approval voting makes.

I can understand a more complex example (than the new "simple example" I introduced) is needed to clarify how the "tactical" voting works, and other concepts related to approval voting that need explaining, I can even appreciate such "untypically simplified complex examples" come from handbooks written by serious people, but in the end I think it might be perfectly possible to lend & adapt an example (or set up one) that neither has the flaw of not being a real approval voting example, neither is too limited to explain the most important concepts relating to this type of voting.

For clarity: I have no problem whatsoever with Tennessee or whatever other state or country being used by way of example: only the example should not set the bad example (or even merely suggesting) of making the supposition that in an approval vote everyone votes for exactly two candidates.

I'd rewrite the example, but then I have no clue what even remotely likely data might have been for Tenessee; and also spilling these data in the article page might encumber the example with a degree of complexity not useful in explaining the base concepts.

Could anyone help out here?

--Francis Schonken 10:44, 25 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't agree with you that the Tennessee example is misleading. The only thing that could reasonably be done would be to consider also the cases that voters approve the top one or three candidates. A mixture of strategies wouldn't explain anything. KVenzke 04:34, September 12, 2005 (UTC)

User:Couvares added a bullet point: Approval voting is simple enough to carry out quickly in a live meeting without the aid of computers, complicated paperwork, or multiple rounds of voting. This makes it more practical than many other voting systems for small, democratic organizations such as labor unions.

I removed this opinion statement of "more practical" which ignores the difficulty for voters in quickly deciding how many candidates to support.

I'd actually be interested in separating two methods that fit under "approval":

1. Approval voting with a fixed number of winners.
2. Approval voting with fixed threshold for acceptance of a variable number of winners.

They are categorically different in voter strategy.

I consider Fixed-winner Approval Voting in live meetings a perfect example of how not to use approval.

I've seen it attempted. A dozen candidates were sequentially listed with people raising hands on each candidate for support. Voters couldn't easily keep track of the full list of candidates in their heads without anything written down. I believe candidates named near the end of the voting got less votes as people got saturated by choices. I believe other more careful voters (like myself) offered to few votes I was I unable to backup the voting and add my support for a previously announced candidate. It was a real mess.

On the other hand, a fixed-threshold approval vote might be used to select sequential discussion items:

For example, a progressive/efficient meeting chair might say "Brainstorming has produced 8 independent proposed soluions to our problem. To speed up discussion we'll in immediate sequence yes or no whether further discussion will be allowed for each proposal. Choices with 50% support will have 30 minutes of discussion following. Choices below 50% will be disregarded immediately."

Under a fixed-threshold system, undervoting on "fair choices" to help a favorite choice is discouraged for fear of losing ALL fair choices. Overvoting is discouraged only by the limits of patience of the voters to deal with more winners.

I could see something like this would seem "more democratic" than using simple "Robert's rules of order", with a single "motion" up at a time, and people being forced to vote on a final decision before knowing all the options.

I accept when the term "Approval Voting" is used, it is assumed to mean fixed-winner Approval.

I don't believe there is a practical use for "Approval voting" in live meetings because of the difficulties I offered above. A voting method shouldn't give more power to smarter people - people who can quickly apply strategy on how widely to vote.

Tom Ruen 04:45, 24 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
UPDATED: Tom Ruen 07:12, 24 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The question was asked, where do they use approval voting?

The United Nations uses Approval Voting to select its Secretary-General; this highlights AV's ability to select the least objectionable candidate when voters vote their opinion (as opposed to "strategically voting").

Also, around 500 B.C., Athenians used annual disapproval voting to determine which politician they most wanted to exile (to prevent too many leaders from being banished, the rules were changed to require 6,000 such votes).

From: Fred Baldwin Ph.D, "Election Dissection - Different polls for different goals." July 2004. Attache http://www.attachemag.com/archives/07-04/features/story2.htm

Iarex 22:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)iarex[reply]

Apparently the UN does NOT use multiple rounds of voting (from the link). I wonder if they care what "approval" level the winner gets? Do they care if one candidate gets 90% and another gets 89%? Do they care if no candidate gets 50%? Do they care if no candidate gets even 10%?

I still don't see any "live meetings" successfully using approval.

Tom Ruen 05:24, 24 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Tom, you seem to have a POV about whether Approval should be used in live meetings, which is not especially relevant to the article. I also see no reason to remove the fact that Approval is easy for live meetings; you can have the opinion that it's flawed, but that doesn't make it less easy.

Approval voting, as defined, has one round; if you have multiple rounds, then you're holding a runoff election that has much different properties. I have only ever witnessed one Approval runoff, and it was here on Wikipedia for the template standardization contest. (It went very badly.)

RSpeer 15:37, 24 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Given the fact that I have no evidence of Approval being used successfully in live meetings, my opinion would seem to be confirmed that Approval is not easy.

Tom Ruen 18:50, 24 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I had no problem with the voting procedure being described before using the singular they. The "he or she" strikes me as just a bit more awkward, but I don't think it's worth reverting over. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 19:05, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the following "studies":

Thomas Colignatus (afaik his real name is Thomas Cool but he prefers Colignatus because he thinks it's cool) PDF: "The normal state in the world is “strategic voting” (cheating) and then AV collapses to “Plurality Voting” (PV), where people basically vote for their first candidate."

Emile C. J. Sheng PDF: "From a game theoretic standpoint, voters with ordinal preferences among the candidates are decreasing the influence of their ballots if they vote for multiple candidates; their votes are most decisive and influential when they concentrate their support on one candidate only."

Incorrect. Example: There are three candidates, A, B, C. A and B are well established. C is a complete newbie with almost no funding. I like C most, B almost as much and I despise A. If I am too proud to compromise so that I only vote for C, I give away the possibility to influence who wins. I will mark B. But making also a mark for C comes at 0 cost, so I will mark B AND C. --R.H. 01:22, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• Those conclusions seem fairly dubious to me, yes, but the fact that you disagree with the studies is not a reason to remove them. Do you have a better reason? For example, have these papers not been peer reviewed and published? rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 07:44, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thomas Colignatus says that the status quo should have privileged status in voting systems. In general, giving no option a privilege is viewed as a feature (Neutrality Criterion) and not a bug . One can alter any method to have a status quo bias though.

See also my comment below. On this point here: there is a difference between technical and moral. Technically it is possible not to eat, but that does not mean that you should not eat. Technically you can present voting systems without the status quo given special position, and then it helps to see the features that arise; but morally you would want the pre-condition of the selection of points that are at least as good as the status quo, in order to protect minority rights. Thus, the term 'neutrality criterion' would be a technical phrase that can be misleading about its moral impact. Indeed, you can add tires to any car, but, it would be strange when car sales persons start selling cars without tires, since you can always add them yourself. Thus, voting theorists should think twice before presenting voting systems to the general public without the status quo pre-condition. Thus, I have always granted that 'technical neutrality' is a feature and that the status quo can be added, but my point was that from the angle of democratic theory, the issue is reversed. Thanks for referring to my work, but please refer accurately. Colignatus 22:59, 10 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Emile C. J. Sheng cites an example of voter preferences (I mean what is in their heads before they vote) outlined by Approval supporter Lin Jih-wen. It is the first scenario in the article. He claims Lin Jih-wen used this as an example how strategy-proof Approval is and then tries to use the same example to show the opposite. The scenario shows a Condorcet Cycle (he doesn't mention that it is one). What method doesn't look bad with a genuine Condorcet Cycle? (IRV for example fails Reversal Symmetry in such situations). Given that genuine Condorcet Cycles happen rather seldom (according to simulations posted on the electorama mailing list those occur with non-strategizing voters with a likeliness of 5%-10%) it probably doesn't tell much positive or negative about Approval.

He proceeds to describe how in that situation voters have to vote somebody over their true favorite to prevent the one they dislike most from winning. "How is that possible?" you might ask, given that according to Mike Ossipoff and others there is no reason to put somebody above your favourite (Favorite Betrayal Criterion). Well, the Condorcet Cycle is not enough for that, you must also change the votes from being cast at the same time with protecting privacy.

I don't think Brams advocates that.

He continues by saying Approval fails the "monotonicity condition". The wikipedia article says it passes. Douglas Woodall has several criteria that he calls mono-something and he calls what is normally called monotonicity "mono-raise". What Sheng means by "monotonicity condition" he never says. --R.H. 19:09, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder whether non-preferential Approval voting (cf. Preferential voting) has to be (game theory) or usually is against the representation of minorities. Taking an example from e.g. staff representations or union elections: 3000 possible votes, 11 choices on ballot, 7 of those 11 will get a seat, a minority of 500 (17%) which is 100% for representation of 1 person, usually get's not represented.

My question: is this mathematically inevitable?

• Is it worse the more unpreferred choices there are on the ballot paper?
• If this problem is known, how to improve it?
• How to improve it in an acceptable way for the majority - otherwise you don't get it done.

If this problem is already addressed here somewhere, please point to it.

Are the voting simulating programs, where one could test things and experiment with voting behaviour of groups of voters? Tommie 12:26, 30 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Approval Voting in general means the single winner method described in the article. Multiwinner doesn't necessarily mean proportional.

The first winner with Block voting is probably a great centrist (especially if you are allowed to make as many marks as you want), the second winner makes an almost as good centrist, the third winner is almost as good at being a centrist as the second etc. The reason why simply taking the top vote getters as winners is unlikely to produce proportional results is because Approval Voting is a good method to elect a centrist. This also tells us something about single mark ballots. The reason why lone mark plurality ballots can be used for more proportional representation or runoffs with exciting debates among interestingly different candidates is because lone mark is so bad at electing centrists.

Here is a worst case scenario with block voting: Suppose there is a strong divide with people divided into camps so that everybody in a camp votes for every candidate from that same camp and nobody else. Group A is 20% of the voters, group B 19%, group C 18%, group D 17%, group E 16%, group F 10%. 10 seats to get. If 2 candidatas from group A run, they both get a seat which is fine. If 3 candidates from group A run, they all get a seat. Well, it is very seldom possible to give seats exactly according to the votes, there are basically always rounding errors. But what if 4 candidates from that group run, or 5, or even 10? They will all get a seat.

Marking a candidate that doesn't get a seat shouldn't cost the voter something (like it does with cumulative voting). But a ballot that is successful at electing a candidate for the first seat must be downgraded in voting power for the next round of counting so that voters who got shafted in the first round have more say in the second round which picks the second winner. This is what the method by Thorvald Thiele does. It is described at the end of the Proportional approval voting article (the nonsequential version described before that gives more proportional results but needs a computer). The method by Thiele has been criticized because the amount of downgrading a ballot gets is only determined by how often it is successful at electing a candidate. Suppose there is a highly divided electorate and the first seat goes to somebody only approved on 10% of the ballots. Each of those ballots get downgraded to one half in the second round. Compare that to an electorate that strongly supports one candidate so the first seat goes to somebody approved on 90% of the ballots. According to Thiele each of those ballots get downgraded to one half for the second round as well. E. Phragmén developed a counting method that recognizes the difference: Olli Salmi on (Sequential) PAV and Phragmén --R.H. 15:16, 30 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just entered a User talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Colignatus and, to check that it had been entered correctly, I did a search and also noted this page. Two Points: (1) It appears that there had been a link to a paper of mine, that R.H. however removed again. It appears that I have been quoted correctly that AV "basically" comes down to PV. But R.H. neglects this "basically" and gives an example where there is a small difference. My point however was that, granted that such exceptions exist, the rule is that AV ~ PV. I emphasize this point since my research shows that a Borda Fixed Point approach would be best, considering common conditions, so that all research into AV most likely is a dead end. (2) One question was whether my paper on AV has been peer-reviewed. No, my papers generally aren't, since I wait till the censorship of science by the Dutch government has been solved, and then I can start joining the usual scientific process again. In the mean time I put my work on the web so that people can see what the censorship is about. (1) + (2) I would enjoy if the reference is restored, though will not do so myself, not only for the above, but in particular since the issue of the Status Quo is important in that paper as will, which issues tends to be overlooked in voting theory ("tends" is not "is"). Thanks for the good work. Colignatus 21:38, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've come across an interesting discussion of the possibility of an approval-disapproval voting system. Take this example:

[DISCLAIMER: I'm not a Libertarian or pushing an agenda.]

I'm a Libertarian voter - for both free market and what I view as civil rights. My choices are as follows:

Libertarian Party - Share nearly all values.
Democratic Party - Share some social and economic values.
Republican Party - Share few social values and many economic values.
Green Party - Share many social values and few economic values.
Constitution Party - Share few social values and some economic values.
Socialist Party - Share some social values and few economic values.

I obviously prefer the Libertarian Party over everyone else, but I also obviously would very much not want to see a Socialist or Constitutionalist win. Depending on whether I value social or economic values higher, I might prefer either the Greens or the Republicans, or I may compromise and choose the Democrats. However, any would be solid choices over the Socialists and Constitutionalists. Therefore, I might want to vote thus:

[FOR] - Libertarian
[NEUTRAL] - Democratic
[NEUTRAL] - Republican
[NEUTRAL] - Green
[AGAINST] - Constitution
[AGAINST] - Socialist

Then, my vote might be counted as +1 for the Libertarian Party and -1 each for the Constitution and Socialist Parties. Extrapolate this across an electorate of 25,000 and you might get something resembling the following:

Libertarian: 10,000 FOR/11,000 NEUTRAL/4,000 AGAINST = 6,000
Democratic: 12,000 FOR/6,000 NEUTRAL/7,000 AGAINST = 5,000
Republican: 13,000 FOR/3,000 NEUTRAL/9,000 AGAINST = 4,000
Green: 11,000 FOR/5,000 NEUTRAL/9,000 AGAINST = 2,000
Constitution: 5,000 FOR/13,000 NEUTRAL/7,000 AGAINST = -2,000
Socialist: 6,000 FOR/10,000 NEUTRAL/9,000 AGAINST = -3,000

In which the Libertarian candidate, who has the greatest majority of approval votes over disapproval votes, wins the election.

Since I think this method has some level of support, I wonder if it should be included in the article. Cheers! —Cuiviénen, Sunday, 19 March 2006 @ 19:16 (UTC)

This is equivalent to Range voting. KVenzke 18:12, 6 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(context: on Wikipedia we have Elections for the Board of Trustees)

Approval voting is a is a voting system used for elections, where a "list of candidates" must be pre-defined. If the list have "democratic origins", the election by approval voting will show a democratic result. It is a perfect system for wikipedia community...

But what is a "candidate" in a direct democracy? People that wants power? Marketing? Volunteers? Whant help others? It was good if I, or you, or your friends, be a candidate? (And how many candidates on the list to be a democratic list?)

We have on Wikipedia community a exceptional opportunity to do a "more truth" democracy... the goal of this community is to colaborate on articles, and through articles we know people. Only on this "known people" we can vote (!). Not names or promises on a "Elections list of self-candidates".

We haven't time to investigate another people, only ours "known people", and this is a good principle: colaborators voting on a colaborator from (and only from) the articles where he/she was colaborate. From this first ease voting we can produce a very surprised and democratic list of potenctial candidates... and invit the "best approval" of then to become candidates.

Operationally it is possible:

• Principles:
  1. Truth democracy need also to generate, all time, new and truth candidates.
  2. Only about your "known (local) people" we can do a truth vote.
• Possible wiki process to generate renewed and democratic list of candidates:
  1. Each colaborator can votate on N (1, 2 or 3) colaborators from (and only from) M (2*N or 3*N not very more) articles where he/she was colaborate.
  2. We will have a "per article", "per language" or "per etc." (level) elected ones. They will be invited to become "per level" candidates.
  3. The confirmed candidates will go to compose the "list of candidates".

-- User:krauss (please sorry my english if necessary)

Found this hanging around

" However strategy issues of candidate list order if voters are not fully aware and reflective of the full set of candidates before any votes are cast.) "

Looks like an editing remnant?

Unless I am misunderstanding, the article "Generalized Spectral Analysis for Large Sets of Approval Voting Data Article" by David Thomas Uminsky in the links seems to be about the case where there are only two "candidates", and only one of them will be selected. The author calls this "approval voting", but I don't think he means the same thing as is usually meant by the term; in his case, I believe approval voting is the same as plurality voting.

So, I think that link should be removed.

Bayle Shanks 07:58, 2 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I see that my sourced revisions were reverted by someone who didn't have the time to explain why they are so "misleading" and who in the process deleted two peer-reviewed sources. Of course I am reverting back and asking for an explanation. ←Ben^B4 02:20, 22 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. ←Ben^B4 06:17, 26 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You still do not understand my point. I have always been talking about a single seat election. The "expected outcome" is not generally the most likely winner. I am using the word "expected" in the sense of probability theory — an AVERAGE over the candidates with the utility of each candidate multiplied (weighted) by his probability of victory. If only two candidates have a substantial probability of victory, that average will usually be somewhere in between the utility of one of them winning and the utility of the other winning. Your wording over-simplifies the method.

Another issue — properly done, approval voting would involve only one round of voting. If two or more candidates receive the maximum number of votes, then one of them would be selected at random. There would be no primaries and no run-offs.

Approval is relative. So if there were only two candidates and you like both, you should only approve the one you like more. If you dislike both, then you should approve the one you dislike least. JRSpriggs 06:31, 26 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You are right that I do not understand. In terms of "expected outcome," could you please describe a situation where it is different than the most likely winner? ←Ben^B4 07:09, 26 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Suppose there are three candidates, as follows:

candidate, probability of victory, utility of victory

Alice, 1/2, +500.00 US$

Bob, 1/3, 0.00 US$

Charlie, 1/6, -2100.00 US$

In this scenario, Alice is the most likely winner; and Bob is second most likely. Using the simplified tactic, one would vote for Alice only. However, the average utility is

+500.00 * 1/2 + 0.00 * 1/3 + -2100.00 * 1/6 = 250.00 - 350.00 = -100.00

This expected outcome is less than Bob's utility. So you should actually vote for both Alice and Bob. That is, Charlie is so bad relative to the difference between Alice and Bob that the necessity of defeating Charlie out weights the preference for Alice over Bob. That is, you should risk getting Bob rather than Alice to be as certain as you can be of avoiding Charlie. JRSpriggs 03:27, 27 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That requires that the voter knows the expected utility instead of having just pairwise preferences. I understand now; thank you. ←Ben^B4 08:44, 27 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for fixing it. JRSpriggs 00:09, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is a problem with the section on Tactical Voting. It is questionable whether or not setting an Approval cutoff is a "tactic." The section implies that there is some insincerity involved. A close examination of what "sincerity" means, and its application to Approval Voting, shows that no Approval cutoff is clearly insincere, it is simply a decision, unless there truly is no preference. That is, there is no absolute standard for a "sincere" approval cutoff, any level of expected satisfaction could be chosen by the voter, but it makes sense that a voter will understand that *strategy*, if the voter wants his or her vote to have an effect, will involve setting the Approval cutoff between the two frontrunners. If there are three frontrunners, the analysis gets more complex, but the point is that there is no definition of "sincere" in setting the approval cutoff; basically, a clearly "insincere vote" in Approval, one which reverses preference, makes no sense, and I understand that Brams deliberately designed Approval to have this characteristic.

Ranked methods and Rating methods (Approval being the simplest Rating method, I call it Range 1) have truly different meanings for "Strategic." In Ranked methods, particularly if equal ranking is not allowed, there is only one kind of "strategic voting", which is preference reversal. In Approval, there is only the "insincerity" of equally ranking two candidates when you actually have a preference between them. But, since the method forces this if there are three candidates, unless you have no unique preference order for them, it cannot be said to be insincere. (With three candidates and two ratings, you have to have the same rating for two candidates! -- unless abstentions are excluded, in a Yes/No Approval election, which is quite contrary to precedent.

This ambiguity in the meaning of "strategic voting" is used by opponents of Approval Voting for polemic effect. And that spin is in this article.

There is indeed Approval "Voting strategy," just as there is the same for *any* voting method. A "voting strategy" is a method for converting internal preferences and preference strengths into votes or voting patterns, in order to maximize expected outcome for the voter. There is no avoding strategy, for a voter who wishes to take responsibility for the effects of his or her actions, and a vote is an action, not an expression of sentiment. The whole application of the term "sincerity" to it is problematic, and it gets really dicey when unexamined assumptions are incorporated into the discussion. We see this more intensely with argument about Range Voting. There is a special usage of "sincere" with Range Voting, but, problem is, there is no way that it is defined universally. Range Voting is theoretically optimal with all-"sincere" voters, but to be truly optimal, these voters must vote absolute utilities. Normalizing them to a particular scale spanned by the candidate set causes the performance to decline, because it equates what may be a very strong preference range for one voter with a very weak one with another. There is no defined "sincere" vote. Because of this, Range appears to fail Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives, but this is only true for normalized votes, not for "sincere absolute" ones. The presence of an irrelevant alternative can cause Range ratings to shift only because of normalization. It's a *very* complex issue.

I find it much, much simpler to consider votes as ... votes. Actions. You vote for a candidate if you want to help that candidate win. If you don't want to help the candidate to win, you don't vote for the candidate. It's that simple. Whether or not you want to help a candidate to win depends on the other candidates present, because you may be limited in your *real* choices; i.e., the ballot may be presenting you with irrelevant alternatives. You decide, not some ballot designer who tells you to "Vote for candidates you approve," where to put your weight. Because only one candidate can win, you can put your weight on more than one, because only one of your votes *at most* will actually count, the others are moot. That is why Approval has also been called Alternative Vote.

And then to understand Range, we simply consider that voters are allowed fractional votes. Reform sequence:

Plurality. Vote for one, discard ballots with votes for more than one. Approval: Count all the votes, i.e., don't discard such ballots, count them. Range: allow fractional votes. --- or --- use ranks and pairwise analysis of some kind.

Range is the *simplest* step in increasing voter freedom beyond Approval. Use of ranks, unless preference strength information is incorporated, is far more complex in its implications and strategies. Abd 03:48, 6 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If you think that BenB4 or someone else misrepresented approval voting as more vulnerable to distortion by insincerity than it actually is, then please correct the article. Personally, I find it difficult to define what such insincere (sophisticated) voting would be with sufficient clarity to make a definitive determination of what effect the use of approval voting would have on it. JRSpriggs 21:28, 6 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Approval voting is immune to lying- lying about one's preferences on the ballot will only hurt the person voting. However, it is VERY dependent on where you draw the line between the 'approved' and 'un-approved' candidates. Because of that, it requires as much strategy as a simple first past the post voting system, except that in approval voting, you can also vote for everyone you like more than the person you'd support in a first past the post system.Paladinwannabe2 15:52, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I started working on Instant Runoff Voting recently, and ran into a hornet's nest of sock puppets and an anonymous IP multiple-reverter who turned out to be Rob Richie, Executive Director of FairVote. (See Talk:Instant-runoff_voting for a description of what happened.) Eventually, my actions, and their escalating response, led to their banning from Wikipedia. I see that one of the sock puppets was very active here, this was User:BenB4. His edits were contrary to Wikipedia policy, in that he was violating Wikipedia rules by participating, since he had been banned under other names. I mention this because his edits are fair game for reverting, which normally should be reserved for vandalism. One might note that he used reverts freely in dealing with what he didn't agree with....

But my occasion for being here now is just to begin a discussion of the name for Approval Voting, and the implementation of the method, involved in Count All the Votes. We get Approval Voting, in effect, if we simply start counting all the votes on a standard Plurality ballot, all that is needed is to change the instructions, and to set the counting process as if it were a multiwinner top-N election. This could involve as little as the deletion of a sentence or two from the election code of a state.

It's simple, and it's clean. It's arguably not the *best* method, though some do think that Approval is, in fact, the best, and it is a reasonable contention. But that's not the point. Count All the Votes is proposed as a simple, nearly cost-free reform that does not preclude other reforms. It is a simple increase of voter freedom, and it solves the first-order spoiler effect, and continues to perform well, unlike IRV, if more than two candidates are in reach of winning. Discussion of this may possibly point to some shifts in how the Approval Voting page is presented. Approval Voting really is that simple: just stop discarding ballots merely because a voter gave two alternative winners instead of one.

A great deal of smoke has been emitted over the decision in Minnesota, Brown v. Smallwood, which, according to IRV advocates, rejected Bucklin Voting because it, as the ranks collapsed if there was no majority winner yet, became what we now call Approval Voting, and that the court considered that this was a violation of one-person, one-vote. That is a warped interpretation of the decision. The court actually made it clear, repeating it in a reconsideration, that it was the existence of alternate votes, allegedly unfair to those who preferred only one, and it seems quite likely that this court would have rejected IRV as well; there is legal opinion that this is the case, and a challenge in Minnesota to IRV is practically certain to happen. I think that Approval supporters may want to file a friend of the court brief in that case, because it would be a mistake if the appeal were based solely on the red herring of alleged multiple votes. There was a very cogent dissenting opinion in Brown v. Smallwood that explicitly denied any violation of one-person, one-vote, and it is clear that the majority of legal opinion at the time was that there was no such violation.

Brown v. Smallwood was a remarkable decision, in which the court majority cited a precedent and then immediately contradicted it without showing any consciousness that they were doing so. My opinion is that the precedent will be reversed if challenged, one point on which I agree with FairVote Abd 02:57, 6 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I made some changes to the article yesterday, and I realize that some aspects of them might be controversial. They were taken out by a user, Special:Contributions/VSJA. That was a single-purpose account SPA created at the end of September, and only used here for three edits, including two on what I added, though one was harmless and even useful. Given that this article was one being managed by the sock Special:Contributions/BenB4 it's not surprising that further incarnations of this sock would continue to attempt to function here. One of this set of socks attempted to remove his account from Wikipedia, but goofed and did it from anonymous IP, thus revealing his IP; then he had reason to ask for removal of the talk page there, which happened, but not before I saved a copy. It looks like VSJA didn't make that mistake. He creates an SPA, makes a couple of hits, then drops the account.

Fine. Saves me the trouble of reporting.

As to substance, I'm certainly willing to discuss this. Approval Voting was actually designed to be strategy-free, and this is quite displeasing to some, and they managed to get papers published about the alleged vulnerability of Approval Voting to strategy.

It's a linguistic trick. With ranked methods, tactical voting refers to preference reversal, which is clearly insincere. In Approval, a voter effectively sets an approval cutoff. The voter can set that anywhere, there is no standard for what is "sincere." What would clearly be insincere would be preference reversal, where the voter approves a candidate less preferred than one he does not approve, which is silly. Brams was right. Approval is strategy-free, in the sense of never encouraging insincere voting. Does this mean that there is no "strategy" to it? Of course not!

A voter who has some idea about the likely outcome of the election can predict, commonly, that the winner will come from a set of two, at most. Certainly this is true in the U.S. for partisan elections! When there are many such candidates, nevertheless the voter may have some idea of who some of the top possibilities are. But with two it is simple: pick the favorite and set the approval cutoff between that one and the other. And then use that to determine all the votes. This is well-known as a recommended Approval strategy. Certainly there is the possible but more complex application of game theory to the problem, but game theory will only suggest a more accurate position for the Approval cutoff; while this is a use of optimizing strategy, it is in no way offensive, Approval is not "vulnerable" to it, because that implies some kind of pathology, it is POV language, which is why I removed it.

But this argument, that Approval is vulnerable to tactical voting, is a key argument of FairVote in its campaign against Approval Voting, which is starting to get some traction, so it is attracting more opposition from the IRV advocates. Used to be they simply dismissed it as irrelevant. The socks who made a few edits here were much more active on the Instant Runoff Voting article, protecting the spin there. They got nuked. The Executive Director of Fairvote, Rob Richie, using anonymous IP to make repeated hacks at criticism of IRV legitimately inserted into the article, got his IP blocked. His associate and co-author, Terrill Bouricius, who registered an SPA to act in "protecting" the article, was also blocked, but, partly due to my intervention, his access was restored. We will see if I come to regret that....

I am certain: they, people associated with or supporting FairVote are now watching all my contributions looking for anything that reduces their spin. There are sincere supporters of Instant Runoff Voting, I am sure, who will restrain any excesses of mine; but I'm actually being pretty careful to leave my advocacy hat at the door when I'm editing articles, I put it back on sometimes on Talk. My POV causes me to notice opposite spin, to be sure. But that is how this should function: people with differing views come together to find agreement on basic facts and a good article.

Abd 04:16, 8 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What you are doing is deleting sources from the article -- peer-reviewed sources -- why are you doing that? The text you are replacing them with has no citation to any source. Is it just your personal opinion?

Do you know what happens when everyone in an approval election votes tactically? It sqeezes out the middle, moderate candidates -- going the opposite direction from the Borda count, and favoring radicals. You would know that if you read the sources instead of deleting them. VSJA 06:25, 8 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm trying to engage with real editors, not socks. That an article full of unsubstantiated opinions gets published in a peer-reviewed journal does not make those opinions facts. The literature is not in agreement on this subject. Accordingly, we could take it out, or leave what we can agree upon. I addressed the issue above, but VSJA did not engage on the issue. To be sure, it will take a careful examination, and what I've claimed about the source articles will need to be looked at carefully. I'm trying to think of how and where to do that. There is a newly formed Election Methods Interest Group which is soliciting membership and participation from those interested in election methods,

But "we," in terms of the consensus that governs this article, in accordance with Wikipedia policies, does not include SPAs who register and immediately dive in, obviously fully engaged with an article, with the same tactics and interest as the banned BenB4. Sure, there is a small possibility that VSJA is ... what? A total newbie with a developed sense of how to maintain spin in an article, as we saw BenB4 doing with example after example? Small possibility. Very small. Much more likely, if he is *not* BenB4, he's a meat puppet. Election experts are invited; and I think they are coming. What *do* election methods experts agree upon? Isn't that an interesting question? I think we should find out.

Note that this article has now been flagged because of a contradiction between what [User:VSJA|VSJA]] put back and what is in the Tactical Voting article. To be sure -- and for full disclosure -- I edited that article too, which had totally unsubstantiated claims in it. However, I'm also talking about what is going on here in the Wikipedia Election Methods world elsewhere, places where election methods experts hang out, and *not* merely those who agree with me. I'm seeking *real* participation by those knowledgeable on this subject, and not just here, but elsewhere. In the absence of a way that election methods experts can express some consensus, organizations like FairVote can pretend that they have the support of "experts," when, in fact, it is only a few. If we get the experts together and they agree to something, and that isn't my personal opinion, I'll definitely stand aside. Until then, VSJA, you are free to complain. You know the system.

(Notice, by the way, that VSJA doesn't have a user or talk page, I can tell by the link color. Perhaps, if he's real and not a sock puppet, he'd tell us something about himself, on his user page. Does he have experience with the study of election methods, or is he an activist?) Abd 05:14, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I will do so. Where is the evidence that "the literature is not in agreement"? And what exactly are your qualifications on the subject? VSJA 15:00, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is because there is disagreement on what constitutes 'tactical voting'. Wikipedia has tactical voting defined as 'voting insincerely' instead of 'voting strategically'. Approval voting, like IRV, is susceptible to 'voting strategically'- in fact, it requires voting strategically in more cases than IRV does. Unlike IRV, though, Approval voting NEVER encourages ranking one candidate above another insincerely. According to our currently accepted definition of tactical voting, Approval voting never involves tactical voting. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Paladinwannabe2 (talk • contribs) 20:32, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

User:Tbouricius added a comment that Approval Voting fails the Majority criterion. This is a common opinion, however if we look at the Criterion as stated in the article, we see:

The majority criterion is a voting system criterion, used to objectively compare voting systems. As applied to ranked ballots, the criterion states that if a majority of voters ranks a given candidate higher than every other candidate, then that candidate should win. For non-ranked ballots (e.g. Approval voting or range voting) it can be expressed as follows: "If more than half of the voters give candidate X a higher rating than any other candidate, the winner should be candidate X."^[1]

We can consider Approval Voting as a ranked system which allows equal ranking. If a voter marks for a candidate, and marks for no others, this voter has expressed an exclusive preference for that candidate, this is ranking that candidate "higher than every other candidate." And, as with Plurality, which is really an almost identical system, only with the *added* restriction that only one vote is allowed, if a majority so ranks a candidate, that candidate must prevail.

In Approval, the voter, however, may choose to rank a candidate *set* higher than every non-member of the set. If a majority of voters so ranks such a set, the winner of the election must come from that set.

Now, you will find in many lists the claim that Approval does not satisfy the Majority Criterion. If you follow the reference in this article, however, you will find that James Armytage-Green has also stated that Approval does not satisfy the criterion, but he also notes that there is, to him, an ambiguity in the definition, he is thinking of unexpressed preferences.

We can say, yes, that it can be true that a majority of voters prefer A to B, but if enough of those voters *also* vote for another candidate, that other candidate can win. But this is not the Majority Criterion. Plurality is generally considered to pass the Criterion. However, a majority of voters could prefer A to B, but, in an election against C, they could think that only B has a chance of winning, so they vote for B. Thus, if we based our analysis of compliance on unexpressed preferences, Plurality cannot satisfy the Criterion, because it is possible for this failure to occur.

How likely is it? Opponents of Approval Voting are fond of claiming that Approval does not satisfy "majority rule," though majority rule is really a completely different principle, one which would, for example, suggest that a winner of an election should never represent a candidate opposed by a majority, which IRV, as described in the Instant Runoff Voting article, can certainly do, whereas the method described in Robert's Rules as "preferential voting," does continue to consider all ballots in determining "majority," and thus does not determine a plurality winner unless the specific election rules so allow. (Robert's Rules, by default, does not allow an election by plurality.)

In a two-party system, by definition, most voters are supporters of two major parties. These voters have no reason to do anything other than bullet-vote, unless perhaps they want to indicate some kind of support for a third party, they might give some additional approvals for that. But those who favor a third party, these will be the ones who will vote multiply. It might be only a few percent, but it's enough to deal with the spoiler effect. It would be *highly* unusual to see more than one candidate getting a majority, and even more unusual to see the winner be one not actually preferred by the majority. But, of course, it could happen. Nevertheless, this would be a good election outcome, one which receives the consent of the largest majority of voters!

I removed the claim. It's controversial, if it is going to be in there, the statement should be qualified.

Abd 06:01, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is incredible...Approval/Range Voting advocates appear to have distorted the Wikipedia page re-defining the universally accepted definition of the "Majority Criterion" as it can be found in any elections systems text book, in order to make a neat little exception for Approval?Range Voting. All political scientists who study voting systems agree that Approval Voting DOES NOT pass the Majority Croterion, and Wikipedia should not miss-represent that fact. This is a terrible example of inserting POV bias.

Here is an example of how the Majority Critereion is normally defined (this quote is from by James Green-Armytage from Antioch College)

"Majority criterion (MC): If more than half of the voters rank candidate X over every other candidate, then the winner should be candidate X.

Some methods that fail MC: approval [*], ratings summation, Borda"

Wikipedia should reflect scholarly consensus not POV of zealots.

I will undo this edit in both the Approval Article and the Majority Criterion Article.

Tbouricius 14:44, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As to zealots, indeed. Tbouricius is an active proponent of Instant Runoff Voting, on the staff of FairVote. We have welcomed him here, because his point of view is important if we are to have true consensus on articles. But it appears that he does not understand that he cannot impose his opinions on all of us without discussion. The extended definition also came from James Green-Armytage. Now, I've discussed this very issue at some length with Mr. Green-Armytage, and he is aware that there is a problem: the definition of the criterion, as stated, depends on a meaning of "rank" that is something other than what is on the ballots. When methods other than Approval are being considered, the ballot is ranked, so the meaning of "rank" is unambiguous: it would be preposterous to insist that, say, a Condorcet method fails on the basis that the voters might have one preference order and vote another. "Rank" refers to what is on the ballot itself, not to the mental state of the voter. But with Approval, there are only two ranks: Approved and Not Approved, or Yes and No, with the No being assumed if there is no Yes. So how can we read this: "if the voters .... rank a candidate?"

What the analysis have done who claim that Approval fails the criterion is to take a criterion designed for ranked methods and apply it to Approval, which is in a different class of methods, though it does have two ranks, just like Plurality. Now, suppose that somehow we define rank to include hidden preferences, i.e., the voter actually prefers A to B but votes A = B. Yes, then, the "preference" of the voter, being in the majority, can fail to be elected. However, is this not also true of Plurality? For if a voter has a preference for A over all other candidates, but, say, does not believe that A has a chance, and perhaps a majority of voters think this way, they may vote instead for B and B wins. There is no guarantee of the victory of a majority preference unless the majority votes in such a manner as to express the preference. If they abstain, they have no guarantee! And this is what they do when they equally rank another candidate top; they no longer have the guarantee. They have not *expressed* an exclusive preference.

Is there a scholarly consensus on this point? I say not. Prove that there is. There is a way you can, Mr. Bouricius. Join the Election Methods Interest Group [1] and participate, for the goal of that group is, in fact, in part, to measure the actual consensus of experts as well as of others interested in election methods. I have no idea if the community of experts would consider Mr. Bouricius as an expert on voting methods, but they might. And they might consider me so as well, though I have no academic credentials. It's not up to me, it's up to the community of experts.

Mr Bouricius indicated his intention to edit the Majority Criterion article. He did so, and made a major blunder. But I'll point that out in Talk for that page when I correct his edit. Approval satisfies the Majority Criterion as written. Abd 06:02, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If the majority criterion is "If a majority of voters ranks a given candidate higher than every other candidate, then that candidate should win.", then approval voting will not always satisfy it. However, I would question whether the majority criterion is actually a good criterion. It ignores the intensity of voters' preferences. If only 51% of the voters have a slight preference for Alice over Bob but 49% have a strong preference for Bob over Alice, then it seems reasonable to me for Bob to be elected rather than Alice. The difficulty, as always, is how to measure the intensity of voters' preferences reliably, that is, in a way that does not allow them to cheat by exaggerating. JRSpriggs 00:45, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

JRSpriggs, well-meaning as he is, apparently falls into the common error of considering hidden, unexpressed preferences, which no election method can incorporate in its analysis. Approval is really a Plurality method, only with equal ranking allowed; equal ranking does not deprive the majority of any power, except as the majority consents, explicitly, by voting for more than one. If Approval fails, so does Plurality, I don't think it is possible to have it both ways without an extraordinarily complex Criterion.

Whether or not the MC is a wise criterion to depend upon is an entirely different matter. It is easy to show than any optimal election method must fail MC, which is, essentially, a proof that Approval is not an optimal election method! It is merely quite a good one, compared to Plurality, and, yes, IRV. It certainly is cheaper than IRV! But if ideal method is what we want, we can then move on from Approval. It is merely a very good, very cheap, first step. Just Count All the Votes!

It should be known that I have discussed this question with a whole series of election methods experts, and there is a consensus on one point: the Criterion is not worded in such a way as to make its meaning, when applied to Approval Voting, clear. And I've seen various attempts to fix this, and, from my point of view, they all have failed, they lead to one absurdity or another. Maybe I should write an article about this. If I could get it published, peer-reviewed, and I think I could, then I'd be a published author in this field! Could I then quote myself here and tell the rest of you to stuff it? I think not.... Abd 06:02, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Majority Criterion doesn't apply to Approval Voting, because Approval voting is NOT A RANKED BALLOT. A ranked ballot implies an ordering of all the candidates, and approval voting specifically does not order all the candidates, it merely has a yes/no option for each one. We cannot 'consider Approval Voting as a ranked system which allows equal ranking' any more than we can 'consider a sphere to be a circle that goes beyond the plane'. Mathematical properties of circles don't all apply to spheres- you can't talk about chord (geometry) on a sphere, for instance. Bickering about whether Approval voting passes Majority Criterion is like debating if a perpendicular bisector of a sphere's chord passes through the center.

Paladinwannabe2 14:56, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

For an even better example, we could say Plurality voting is a 'ranked system which allows equal ranking'- certainly all the candidates other than the one you vote for are ranked equally. Would you argue that Plurality voting passes the majority criterion? If you say that Plurality voting fails the majority criterion, you're also arguing that Approval voting fails, because to argue plurality voting fails you have to rely on 'unexpressed preferences'. Paladinwannabe2 16:47, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is a claim made by Approval (and Range voting) advocates that the system is exempt from Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, and manages to side-step such tests as the Majority Criterion, because it is not a ranked voting method. I do not believe this assertion is supportable. For now let me limit my point to the Majority Criterion under discussion.

The majority criterion sets out a hypothetical scenario of voter preferences and then tests different voting methods in that unique scenario. The scenario imagined is one in which voters DO have clear preferences, and in this particular election a majority of voters consider one particular candidate to be the absolute best choice. This scenario exists PRIOR to deciding which voting method is to be used. The Majority Criterion test is simply; Is a given voting method certain to elect this candidate? If these voters in this scenario vote using certain methods (FPTP plurality, Condorcet, IRV, etc.) that particular candidate is certain to win, and thus they meet the majority criterion. If these voters vote using Approval (or Range, or Borda, etc.), that candidate may or may not win. Thus by definition, Approval fails the majority criterion.

One can argue whether the majority criterion is a good or useful criterion, but there really is no debate among political scientists about whether Approval fails this particular test. The fact that a particular voting method does not allow voters to express details about their full set of preferences, does not mean that voting system cannot be tested for a specific scenario, and cannot exempt it from the criterion.

Tbouricius 14:38, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't remember if I read this somewhere or not, but I considered the same example and same conclusion against approval voting. A majority may vote against their best interest in Approval (by overvoting with a compromise choice) if they don't have knowledge of their collective power. Of course plurality can fail this easy case as well by an overuse of strategic compromise when afraid their top choice can't win. (In contrast a top-two runoff will pass this test since a sincere vote in the first round can be made for a candidate who stands a good chance of winning.) Tom Ruen 18:17, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Tom, There is an entire other realm of voting method evaluation dealing with the issue of tactical voting, but the majority criterion is not in that category. It is one of the criteria that compare systems assuming all voters vote sincerely. In that case FPTP plurality complies, because IF a majority favor one candidate, and sincerely vote for that candidate, that candidate must win. That is not necessarily the case with Approval, as you point out, even if all voters vote sincerely.

There has been a recent edit war on this article in the section about tactical voting, which I have not joined. For now I am limiting my involvement to correcting clearly miss-leading statements that contradict what all political science text books have to say about Approval Voting and the Majority Criterion.

Tbouricius 20:37, 18 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to point out that Approval voting violates Arrow's Theorem, specifically:
unrestricted domain or universality- "the social welfare function should account for all preferences among all voters to yield a unique and complete ranking of societal choices. Thus, the voting mechanism must account for all individual preferences, it must do so in a manner that results in a complete ranking of preferences for society, and it must deterministically provide the same ranking each time voters' preferences are presented the same way."
Perhaps whoever put that up meant it doesn't violate IIA? Paladinwannabe2 17:29, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the person who said that Arrow's theorem does not apply was referring to the fact that the theorem takes preference ranking as its input, but Approval voting does not begin with preference ranking. While some may say that everyone has a preference ranking guiding their choice of an actual vote, I would say that what actually guides people (at least rational people) is an assignment of utilities to the possible outcomes. This differs from preference ranking because it is quantitative, i.e. it has spacing in addition to order.

So while Arrow's theorem is a very interesting theoretical result, it has nothing to do with rational voting. JRSpriggs 21:02, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, the theorem says you can't have a voting system with preference ranking, IIA, non-dictatorship, and other criteria. Since Approval lacks a preference ranking, it doesn't matter if it passes everything else, it still fails Arrow's criteria, and therefore does not violate the theorem. Paladinwannabe2 21:20, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The article claims several historical uses of approval voting (or similar methods):

• 13th century Republic of Venice: I am unable to find anything in this article which suggests approval voting (or any variation thereof) was used. Does anyone have any external references?
• Parliamentary elections in 19th century England: Again, I was unable to find any other references to approval voting.
• United Nations Secretary-General: Although the Secretary-General has to be approved by all 5 permanent members of the security council, they also have to be voted in by the majority of the security council, and the majority of the general assembly, so I don't think this really counts.
• Although it warrants a mention as a similar concept, I don't think Bucklin Voting can be considered as simply a variation of approval voting, as voters are not required to approve of individual candidates (they may not approve of any of them, and may simply be ranking the least worst alternatives).

If the first two cannot be substantiated, I suggest they be removed. Any other thoughts on the last two? -3mta3 (talk) 22:10, 28 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm reasonably confident that a published source for the Venice claim can be found and inserted. It's fairly common as a claim about Approval Voting; what would be appropriate would be to place a source needed tag and to remove the claim if no source is provided within a reasonable time. This same editor removed the same claim from the Range voting article, I reverted it there. The claim about the UN Secretary-General is also commonly asserted. What is described above isn't relevant, the question would be the voting method for the General Assembly. Essentially, the 5 permanent members each have a veto power (if that's true, and it may well be). Bucklin voting is "Instant Runoff Approval." That is, if it proceeds to the last round, it has become a full, unrestricted Approval election. First round only, it's simple Majority. Second round, it's two-votes-allowed Approval (but only one per candidate!). The similarity is important: if Bucklin violates one-person, one-vote, which has been asserted by FairVote and which is an interpretation of Brown v. Smallwood (an incorrect one, in my opinion), then so too would Approval.

--Abd (talk) 06:22, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I easily found multiple references by googling "Venice voting." I have cited in the article a paper that might not itself be fully qualified as "reliable source," but which does cite several published papers on the topic in peer-reviewed journals. Ideally, this article should cite the fully qualified sources ... but, for now .... Fascinating to me is that the method used was, more fully, multilevel Asset Voting, a method so new and advanced that I can't probably create an article on it! --Abd (talk) 13:47, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I changed the range voting article simply because it seemed rather stilted prose (the product of too many edits, I assume). The Venice reference is indeed a fascinating one, and the paper seems reasonably objective (i.e. it doesn't seem to be the product of an advocacy group). The UN secretary-general is often claimed, but it is a much more complex (and political) process. No luck on the English Parliament one? -3mta3 (talk) 18:22, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've rearranged the article a bit, moving some of the past uses from the heading to their own section. -3mta3 (talk) 18:50, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As to Parliament, not yet. Brams makes the claim, and he's pretty sober. (But a paper that is simply a talk he gave, even if sourced, is less desirable than published sources, and those are mostly held behind protection. I.e., one has to pay to see the papers. He also claims that Approval was used to elect Popes, and I've seen a source for that. There is a description of the Venetian usage in Voting system, with references. I agree with moving historical usages, for the most part, out of the introduction to a History and Usage section. Brams has also noted various large societies which have adopted Approval (American Mathematical Society, for example), plus he has described the IEEE case, basically saying what I've said in various forums: the IEEE adopted Approval when the board wanted to avoid vote splitting that might have elected a dissident candidate, then they dropped it when the board didn't need it any more. The argument that has been given that Approval was dropped by the IEEE because most voters weren't using it is clearly a specious one. In some elections, votings don't need to cast additional votes, and in some elections, only a minority of voters would do so. Such as Greens in Florida in 2000. The *option* to cast extra votes costs nothing. Actually counting those votes adds a small expense or trouble. With internet voting, no trouble at all.... (And if there are only two candidates, voting for more than one would be quite rare and quite useless, except that one might be more likely to avoid majority failure, if a majority is required for election.)

One more item. Found an election announcement, Sept 2007, for the American Mathematical Society: [2]. Indeed, they use Approval Voting --Abd (talk) 19:08, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The AMS link seems to suggest that approval voting is only used for those two committees (not for the Board of Trustees or other positions). Anyone able to clarify? -3mta3 (talk) 20:31, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Approval voting is used by several scientific societies including the "American Statistical Association". According to its bylaws:[3]

2. Balloting. For all of the Association's elections, the system known as approval voting shall be used. Regardless of the number of candidates or the number of places to be filled, the voter may vote for any number of candidates but may not cast more than one vote for a candidate. Winning candidates are those with the highest numbers of votes. Any tie shall be broken by random selection; no runoff elections shall be held.

JRSpriggs (talk) 04:02, 30 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

To the claim about 19th century England, Abd recently added a source and attribution (diff) with the edit summary “Historical use - until I can find something better, attributed to expert.” I agree with Abd, as he also commented above, that the current source for this claim is not a high quality source for this claim, in part because of the lack of specifics or other references in the source. Moreover, the current source does not make any mention of parliamentary elections. I'll allow some time for Abd or others to follow up and find a better source soon. However, unless a supporting source is found, the mention of parliamentary elections should be tagged or deleted. Without any sourced information regarding further specifics about how, when, and where approval voting was allegedly used in 19th century England and without a reliable source, the article should probably either explicitly note these deficiencies or the claim should be entirely deleted. DCary (talk) 21:17, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd disagree. It's a statement by a known expert, and it is attributed. In other words, what the article currently has is verifiably true. Brams did state that. Obviously, we'd prefer to have better source, in which case it would not need attribution. "According to Brams" covers the situation for the moment. Now, if there is any notable claim that it was *not* used, the balance would shift. We'd have to report both, or neither. I'll stand by the text at this point. But I'll also see if I can ping Brams. (Absent that, the article can note that his claim has not been confirmed, pending confirmation, that's one possible solution. In a "real encyclopedia," the editors would contact him and ask for a source. So.... --Abd (talk) 03:51, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The first thing at issue about the Brams claim is what exactly he is talking about. What happened in 19th century England that Brams claims happened? Did the events actually happen, the way Brams thinks they did? Those are history questions, not political science questions. As far as I know, Brams is not a recognized expert in the history of 19th century England, so his self-published, non-peer-reviewed claims about unspecified historical events do not qualify as a reliable source. If Bram's claim is true, I suspect there will be a reliable source to back up the historical part of the claim. If we can't get a reliable source for the historical part of the claim, there is a strong case for deleting any mention of it. DCary (talk) 00:42, 8 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The claim regarding 13th century Venice, is still without a reliable source. The currently noted source (Mowbray and Gollman) claims approval voting was used. However, the two references Mowbray and Gollman give for descriptions of the Venetian voting do not support that claim. The two references are:

• J. J. Norwich. A History of Venice. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1982, pp 166-167.
• E. M. Tappan. The World’s Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art, volume 5. Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1914, pp 51-54.

Both Tappan and Norwich agree that the Doge was elected with a super-majority requirement (25 out of 41). Tappan is silent about the specific voting system used and offers no suggestion that approval voting was used. Norwich on the other hand makes it clear that approval voting was not used to elect the Doge:

• Each of the 41 electors was allowed to secretly nominate one candidate.
• A list of candidates was created, with duplicate nominations ignored.
• Candidates were selected in random order to be:
  • discussed and questioned
  • voted on
• If a candidate so considered received 25 votes, he was declared Doge, otherwise, another candidate was randomly chosen for the next consideration.

Even regarding the selection of the 41 electors, which was a multi-phase selection process, neither Tappan nor Norwich give any indication that approval voting was used. They both agree there were phases in which a small (9-12 member) deliberative body would select a larger group for the next phase. They also agree that a super-majority was needed, but give no other indication of how voting was done.

Given that there are many ways, without using approval voting, that a deliberative body can go about choosing another multi-member body and that approval voting is not particularly suited for such a task and context, these references are notably unsupportive of the claims in the article. I have growing doubts about the veracity of the claim. It may be appropriate to remove the claim from the article, at least until some truly supportive, reliable sources can be found. DCary (talk) 00:46, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mowbray and Gollman use the term "approval voting" because this is a very recent source (2007) and the term has become common. As with prior considerations of the application of "approval voting," it is necessary to understand that it is Approval voting with special rules added. In this case it is a supermajority requirement to win. The exact sequence of voting is also not specified, only a necessary outcome: to become an elector, the nominee had to receive a minimum number of approvals. This was a complex process used to elect the Doge, but the core resemblance to Approval is that each nominee had to receive that support, the votes are thus independent. As far as anything I've read, there was not necessarily a single ballot; and the supermajority requirement would almost certainly require multiple balloting to elect the required number. That is, I'd speculate, there would be a ballot and every nominee who gets the number of approvals needed would be elected. I'd also surmise that if more than the needed number of electors got that number, the ones that got the most would be elected. The key thing that the sources agree on is that the candidate must receive so many votes. Above was a description of the actual election of the Doge himself. This is *not* claimed to be Approval. Rather, what is in the article is that Venice used "a complicated system of approval voting and random lots to select the committee that would then select the Doge ..." In any case, the point of citing Mowbray and Gollman is that they actually report their conclusion that this was Approval.

However, there is more. Above, I speculate. Turns out that we have explicit report. From Mowbray and Gollman:

As far as we are aware, just two other papers investigate the mathematical properties of the protocol. Lines [11] discusses approval voting, which is the method of voting used in each round which increased the college size, and in the final round. Candidates for the next college (or for the Dogeship, in the case of the final round) were proposed, and a ballot was held in which the current college members signalled either their approval or disapproval of each candidate, with no limit on how many candidates they approved or disapproved. Candidates receiving the required minimum number of approval votes joined the next college. If not enough candidates received the minimum, the college repeated the process, holding another ballot.

Now, this talks about "a ballot being held." If this was a sequential presentation of candidates, with a winner being declared as soon as one reached the required margin, this would be, in theory, different from Approval (because a key feature of Approval is that multiple winners -- nominees reaching the required margin -- are possible). However, in practice, with a high supermajority required, and the number to be elected, the difference would be academic, for it is quite likely that multiple ballots would be needed (and thus every nominee would receive a vote opportunity). It may be that there is some ambiguity in the sources. Above is reference to Lines, and the note refers to [11] M. Lines. Approval voting and strategy analysis: A venetian example. Theory and Decision, 20:155–172, 1986. There's the source! Now, somebody with access to a library.... Here, though, obviously, not even primitive synthesis is necessary to call this "Approval voting." An academic published source calls it that. By the way, Lines is also given as a source for the Venetian claim by Brams in his "Mixed Success" paper. I've found other papers which reference Lines. If we are going to find and use Lines, we might as well also take from that source, if it has it, the years over which it was used. It's cited in another paper as "between 1268 and 1797." If that's true, that is astonishingly stable.

From Springerlink [4]: Approval voting and strategy analysis: A Venetian example; Journal: Theory and Decision; Publisher: Springer Netherlands; ISSN: 0040-5833 (Print) 1573-7187; Volume 20, Number 2 / March, 1986; DOI 10.1007/BF00135090; Pages 155-172; Marji Lines, Facoltà di Economia e Commercio Ca Foscari, Universita Degli Studi di Venezia, 30123 Venice, Italy

Abstract The author presents a historic reconstruction of the single-member constituency election system known as approval voting which was used to elect Venetian dogi for over 500 years. An interesting procedure theoretically, concurrent approval voting is the only sincere single-winner election system. Central issues concerning strategy choice under uncertainty are investigated using a contingency-dependent framework of individual behavior given prior probability distributions over decision relevant propositions. Extensions are then proposed for the use of approval procedures in modern elections and other collective decision-making situations. Finally the advantages of trichotomous preferences in decision and strategy analysis are argued.

Bingo. The point is that this author calls it Approval voting, that's a published conclusion. So, while it will be very interesting to see, if possible, what the exact details were (and then we can note any variations from standard approval voting, we have authority for the use of the term. Brams didn't just make it up. (And even if he had, we could still have attributed it to him and kept it.)

But there is more. Mowbray and Gollman also have some other sources.

In fact, there is a case (described in [15] p.300) in which tactical voting allegedly determined the outcome of one election for Doge. In 1423 Francesco Foscari, an underdog candidate, received 17 approval votes out of 41 in the ninth ballot by the final college and 26 approval votes in the tenth ballot, thus winning the election. It was claimed that his supporters had engineered this win by voting in earlier ballots for a candidate that no-one wanted, thus enticing others to vote for Foscari, and then suddenly switching their votes. Presumably in 1423 concurrent voting had not yet been introduced.

This addresses the sequential voting problem, and why it might have been changed to concurrent voting. Was it changed? If so, pretty much any obstacle to calling this, flat out, Approval voting, would have disappeared. [15} is J. J. Norwich. A History of Venice. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1982. The description above re sequential voting may be referring to earlier elections. I'd still call the sequential variation "Approval," and, in fact, I have many times referred to an "approval poll" that actually took place in an organization I belonged to. And the voting was sequential, because it was by show of hands. Indeed, I've frequently claimed that plurality was actually Approval, and that the freedom to vote for more than one was only lost when secret ballot was introduced. In Venice, we can suspect, they may have gone to written ballots (secret or not), but kept the allowance to vote for more than one. (I've seen a lot of single-winner elections by show of hands. I've never heard an instruction, "vote for one," and I've never seen a challenge to a vote, "But you already voted for another candidate."

Robert's Rules disregards overvoted ballots because they are errors. But why are they errors? Because they will be discarded. Oops!

--Abd (talk) 03:51, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Marjit Lines article is a reliable source. Based on that source, I withdraw my suggestion that a claim about the Dogi of Venice should perhaps be removed from the article. I'll add the Marjit Lines source as a reference and leave the Mowbray and Grollman source since it is more accessible. An open issue is whether and how the claim might be changed. DCary (talk) 00:42, 8 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've been looking for a source for the claim that Approval Voting is used to elect the U.N. Secretary-General. What I've found is a reference that it was used in 1996, that this election of Kofi Annan followed the Wisnumurti Guidelines. The claim, as it has been stated, isn't correct. The Secretary-General, if these guidelines are followed, is nominated by majority vote of the Security Council, with the five permanent members having veto power, and then confirmed (or, theoretically, rejected, though it has never happened) by majority vote in the General Assembly. So where does Approval Voting come in? Well, the guideliness provide for Approval *polling,* where members of the Security Council, with papers colored differently for permanent members and regular members, vote to "encourage" or "discourage" proposed nominees. The poll is not binding, so it is not correct to call it an election, it's a straw poll. The guidelines provide for additional polls to be taken if necessary. Interestingly, the only personal experience I have had with Approval Voting was with just such a straw poll, used to *suggest* a choice between five or six alternatives. While the status quo, in that poll, received something like a 65% approval -- and thus could have been retained by a majority, and was probably the majority's first preference -- there was another option which received 98% approval. This was immediately submitted as a motion to adopt, which passed unanimously. So a similar process resulted in the election of Kofi Annan by acclamation. But an election, it was not. The election was by ordinary motion to nominate, and a majority would probably have legally sufficed, but unanimity was probably, also, considered desirable, as it was in my own experience. In any case, I'm going to remove the claim, as such. I might edit it to reflect the true facts. --Abd 22:31, 30 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The item about Wikipedia Arbitration Committee should be changed, given better sources on some points, or perhaps even removed. If the item is kept, some key issues that need to be addressed are:

• Describe it as an election, as Wikipedia does, or provide reliable sources for not doing so. The fact that the election does not make the final decision does not, by itself, make it any less of an election.
• Be consistent about whether this item is about the 2006 election or ArbCom elections in general. If the latter case, provide appropriate sources.
• Describe the election more accurately as:
  • a multi-winner election
  • a variation of 3-slot range voting (Yes=+1, Abstain=0, No=-1)
  • eligible winners are required to have a positive average vote total, which also means more Yes-votes than No-votes. The part about the unselected candidate should be dropped.
• Make the links http links rather than wiki links to avoid some of the problems with self reference.

Regardless of whether one thinks of this as a poll or an election, since this is not a use of approval voting as otherwise generally discussed in this article and it is either an ongoing practice or it is historically a very recent, not particularly noteworthy event, a strong case could be made for not including it in this article. The example might be of interest to the range voting article instead. DCary (talk) 20:46, 13 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unless we have reliable sources supporting the claim regarding Bucklin voting that it becomes an approval voting election in later rounds, the claim should be weakened, for example by saying that in some ways it becomes more like an approval voting election. DCary (talk) 20:46, 13 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There is mention in this article of the Burr dilemma, which is a neologism coined by Jack H. Nagel in an article published in The Journal of Politics, where he claims that "it has not previously been recognized that the first four presidential elections (1788-1800) were conducted using a variant of approval voting." (from the abstract at [5]. The article itself is at [6]. He's right that it wasn't previously recognized; however, he's off the wall in calling that election "Approval Voting" merely because electors had two votes. A basic characteristic of Approval is that voters are unrestricted in voting for or against all candidates. The election he examines is not Approval at all, it is described on Wikipedia as Plurality-at-large voting, in the article Block voting. It was a "variant" of Block voting because the two offices being elected were not identical, they were the President and Vice-President, but the voting process held a single election for them both, with the recipient of the largest number of electoral votes becoming President and the runner-up becoming Vice-President.

Frankly, I find it appalling that a peer-reviewed publication published the article at all; however, this is the journal of the Southern Political Science Association, and my experience has been that political scientists are not *usually* experts on innovative election methods.

In the Burr/Jefferson election, there was no dilemma in the election itself. The electors cast their votes and Burr and Jefferson tied, i.e., the electors voted for them as expected, given that the party system was developing, and this threw the election into the House of Representatives, which has different rules. That is, both Burr and Jefferson won, but the House had to decide who became President. The framers of the Constitution do not appear to have anticipated the arising of electors dedicated to slates. The "Burr Dilemma" is Nagel's imagination: could Burr or Jefferson have attempted to arrange matters so that one or the other would have won? The dilemma, supposedly, is that if one of them attempts to influence electors to vote for him only, instead of two, the other would have similarly attempted to influence electors to vote for him only, thus spiraling into a retaliatory cycle leading to single-vote Plurality. Which, frankly, makes no sense, since this could quite easily throw the election to their opposition.

None of this has anything to do with real Approval elections, as would take place if Approval were to be adopted for political elections in the U.S., except in a quite peripheral way. Yet Nagel translates this into an indictment of Approval Voting, which is then used by FairVote as an argument against Approval. Even Warren Smith of the Center for Range Voting ([7]) seems to have been taken in, for he confirms the "dilemma" as a strategic problem with Approval Voting, and, of course, suggests Range Voting as a solution. (He's not correct. If the dilemma were real, normal Range Voting would not solve it, because these are strategic voters, and Range voted strategically generally becomes Approval.) Not one of Smith's finer moments, in my opinion.

The point here is that the Burr Dilemma is discussed in this article as if it had something to do with Approval Voting. The only connection is that Nagel calls the U.S. Presidential election process in those days a "variant of Approval voting," which is preposterous: just look at the definition of Approval voting on this page -- or anywhere except Nagel's article. I think the mention should be taken out.

There was language in the Burr dilemma article making pretty much the same point as I just made, until it was taken out with this edit: diff. I've been finding, over the last few months, as I become familiar with the universe of voting systems articles on Wikipedia, that edits like this pop up frequently: a user registers and immediately makes a drive-by edit like this. And nobody is watching. That language was not sourced, that's true, but it was clear and easily verifiable, and thus was defensible (or at least editable to be defensible). I can't be sure that this editor was a sock puppet, but I've seen behavior quite like this from definite socks. There is one sock master who has been very active with the voting methods articles, and I think I've identified socks associated with him that haven't yet been tagged and blocked. In some cases, too much time has elapsed, checkuser wouldn't be able to prove sock puppetry.

The Burr Dilemma has, in fact, nothing to do with Approval Voting. On the other hand, because Nagel does use the name "Approval Voting" in his published article, it could be claimed that the controversy should be included; but I question its notability at this point. Generally, though, I prefer to leave in articles that may be of use to researchers, even when notability is questionable. One of the things that all those socks have been doing is to put up voting methods articles for deletion, and when none of the voting systems editors notice it and defend the article -- only a few may have edited the more obscure articles, and perhaps they don't log in during the AfD process -- the articles get deleted. Such as Proportional approval voting, though it's definitely notable, and there are others. The deletion proposer will claim -- perhaps accurately -- that there has been no mention in peer-reviewed journals, confusing "reliable source," necessary to state fact without attribution, with notability, which is the general standard for article survival. And all it takes is one administrator to buy the argument. See the AfD for PAV: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Proportional_approval_voting. --Abd 03:07, 4 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the reference to IRV requiring major changes to a ballot. In many jurisdictions (eg Canada, UK, etc...) where paper ballots are used, there is no change to the format of the ballot required - all that is needed is that voters put numbers instead of a single 'X'. This does not constitute a significant change. 24.150.226.39 (talk) 22:40, 9 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• And yet you left the reference to Condorcet methods requiring major changes in place, twice [8]. From the voter's perspective all ranked-choice ballots are the same. However, IRV requires massive adjustments in counting. It is not summable and thus the information contained in a ballot is factorial in the number of candidates. Summability criterion used to show this fact but it was deleted. Instead this information is available at Electowiki. As far as whether requiring rankings is a significant change, this is your opinion, and while all of Canada may be using paper ballots, at least 2/3 of the United States is voting on electronic machines, for good or for ill. Changing these voting machines and educating voters would be a major issue with ranked choice voting, while it would be a minor adjustment with approval voting. More importantly, why did you find it necessary to bias that paragraph in favor of IRV versus Condorcet methods? - McCart42 (talk) 23:59, 9 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I thought it was strange to remove IRV while leaving Condorcet, same issue. (A complete IRV ballot is the same as a complete Condorcet ballot, it is merely a different analysis that is used.) "All that is needed is that voters put numbers instead of a single 'X'. That's a radical ballot change, in many places. In some, sure, not. The argument is a general one, and like all general arguments, may not apply in some specific place. There is no serious contention that I've ever seen that the change to IRV, in many places, requires changes to voting procedures and counting procedures, and, where relevant, to voting equipment. Why does San Francisco with it's "Ranked Choice Voting," which IRV proponents call "IRV" when they want to point to success stories -- though it's a mixed bag there, but that's not relevant here -- have only three ranks? It's quite possible that the majority failure in some of those elections (winner had less than 50% of valid ballots cast) results from that restriction, which is due, it's been alleged, to voting equipment restrictions. I changed this language back. I'm not personally adding citation tags for arguments that are well-known, but I think we might pick up a citation from the IRV article.

I'm not happy with the state of this article with respect to NPOV balance. There is criticism of Approval that exists that is not shown here, but favorable arguments are. The Instant-runoff voting article has a controversies section and even a fork has been created for in-depth treatment of arguments, parallel treatment might be appropriate here.--Abd (talk) 03:02, 10 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• The problem is that outright comparisons between IRV and Condorcet, or between IRV and approval, have been deleted when they've been attempted in the "controversies" articles. IRV advocates have called it POV-pushing to compare IRV to approval in their article. You can't discuss one method in a vacuum without comparisons. One perfectly reasonable way to compare methods is by simulations, such as those done by Ka-Ping Yee [9] or Brian Olson [10]. - McCart42 (talk) 03:09, 10 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The elephant in the living room. Approval voting is used to elect members of the Arbitration Committee (I sourced this on the article page). Technically, it is not an election, it is a poll. Any registered Wikipedia user who registered prior to a cutoff date may vote Yes or No on each nominee. Each vote is independent of all the other votes, there is no "vote for N." It's been proposed, and rejected, as has Condorcet voting. "Winners" of the election are not announced as such; rather, the election results are apparently reviewed by Jimbo as advice, and he makes the decision; in 2006, seven members were appointed; they were the seven highest vote recipients in the poll, in terms of vote percentages (percentage Yes, each candidate vote considered in isolation). Fourteen candidates had more than 50% Yes. The candidate with the most Yes votes had, however, a 25% No percentage, leaving him with a lower net Yes vote if Nos are subtracted, or a lower percentage Yes if that is the considered basis.

Technically, this is Range Voting (Average), this is not ordinary Approval, where the candidate with the most Yes votes wins. Net Yes voting (Yes minus No) is more like Range 3 (-1,0,+3), except that there is no 0 vote. Abstentions are not counted, so this is "blanks-excluded" Range.

In fact, the raw votes are available, the identity of the voters is known, and tools could show and compile, for example, the "age" of each voting account, number of edits, etc. The results page shows total Yes, total No, and percentage Yes, i.e., Yes/(Yes+No). In a normal Approval election, we'd want to compile slightly different data. Each "ballot" would be counted, so we'd want to know the number of unique voters. However, I've many times noted that Approval is equivalent to a series of Yes/No Ballot questions, each one of which must pass with a majority. (Apparently, a Yes over No majority is required.) However, with that, it is the one with the most Yes votes which prevails if more than one pass, in the state rules I have seen.

Given that the goal is apparently an Arbitration committee with the broadest confidence of the community, and that there can be severe participation bias, considering the Yes percentage (Yes/Yes+No) instead of the absolute Yes vote, would seem to be appropriate, to me. The danger in this of a "dark horse" winning because most voters, not recognizing the name and having no opinion, leave it blank, is avoided without having any rule about it, is avoided by the fact that this is just a recommendation. Further, in addition, given the easy possibilities of packing the vote, holding the election as a poll feeding an appointment by a "trusted servant" also makes complete sense to me in an environment like Wikipedia. Jimbo can also use any criteria he sees appropriate to analyze the votes. If he wanted to, he could look at user histories for voters (voting is public), to see if there was some balancing necessary, or he can just look at the past behavior of arbiters nominated by the process to see if they are acceptable in his view. Wikipedia is not a democracy, except in certain ways. The founder, so far, retains effective veto power. Eventually, I expect, that may pass. --Abd (talk) 02:05, 10 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fine with this, but per WP:SELFREF you need an outside reliable source which talks about wikipedia elections, I think. MilesAgain (talk) 23:02, 11 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

An IP editor added the sentence about "other political scientists" to this claim about Approval. Now, the whole section, in my opinion, needs rewrite to satisfy NPOV, and we should move in that direction,

• It allows voters to express tolerances but not preferences. Some political scientists^[who?] consider this a major advantage, especially where acceptable choices are more important than popular choices. Other political scientists consider this a major disadvantage, especially where expressing the will of the people is important.

First of all, I think the comment about tolerances, not preferences, is an analysis of what Brams has claimed. I'm not sure of his exact language, and we should bring that here, or else we might be distorting. I do think that Brams repeats what I see as an error of considering Approval votes to be anything other than votes. The assumption that they represent some sort of feeling about the candidate, ("Approval") leads to many problems. In the end, approval votes are just votes. You vote for a candidate you are willing to support, and not for one, or against one, you are not willing to support. It's an *action*, not a sentiment. However, I'm not sure I can find a source for this argument that isn't me. (I've argued this in many places, and, without peer review, I can't use it for the article.) However, this makes me sensitive to what might be distortions of what Brams, or others, have actually written.

Now, as to other political scientists, I don't know who is being referenced. Because all political scientists, including Brams, agree that "expressing the will of the people is important," it is not clear how this translates into some sort of "disadvantage." The question is how we determine or measure that will. Compared to plurality, Approval adds flexibility of expression. Compared to ranked methods with equal ranking disallowed, it adds flexibility in one way while not allowing it in another, and this would be the argument in this piece of the section, that the addition is more important than the restriction. There is an argument that I, unfortunately, have not seen anywhere but my own analysis that IRV and Condorcet methods do violate one-person one-vote, in a way that Approval does not. It relates to this, so I may need to look more closely at Brams to see if he has expressed it, it underlies the theory of Approval Voting and why it might be better than a more expressive (of preference, but not of "approval") ranked method. For starters, it's my view that no candidate should *ever* be elected if a majority of voters have not explicitly approved that election. This is actually fundamental parliamentary procedure, and it is set aside only due to a belief that elections must complete or else the sky will fall. (IMHO!).

On the other hand, ranked methods with equal ranking allowed are in some ways equivalent to Approval, allowing the voter flexibility in how to vote, in "expression." My own understanding has led me to the conclusion that there are two principles to be respected: broadest acceptance and majority rule. That is, Approval arguably fails the majority criterion, but, at the same time, a majority has, in that case, explicitly accepted that "failure," which preserves majority rule. (Thus the common usage of dealing with multiple conflicting ballot questions.) It can't be done with Approval, unless some "favorite" indicator is added to the ballot, but if such were added, the ballot could be examined for both the Approval winner and the preference winner, if they are different. That is, if there is a candidate who, considering the Favorite marks, beats the Approval winner, a runoff would be triggered. The electorate explicitly decides, by majority vote, between the options of widest approval and majority preference. The combined method satisfies the majority criterion, and, from simulations, the Approval winner is almost always the Condorcet winner, so ... runoffs would not be common. (Think about what it takes for those two winners to be different: it takes people who have voted for both frontrunners.... not common.)

I'm certainly friendly to improving the language of this section, and I consider it unbalanced as it is. But something more clear than what was attempted is needed; and it may well be best to actually quote one or more of those "other political scientists." Presumably the anonymous editor, if he or she reads this, has some actual comment in mind and can thus easily supply it. --Abd (talk) 03:49, 10 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article has apparently had little attention by those who are not advocates of Approval voting in recent weeks, and is not now NPOV. It is certainly more unbalanced than the IRV article, which wears the POV tag. For example, the section on strategy presents the issue of tactical voting in the most positive light poossble. What about Nicolaus Tideman's analysis that shows Approval is among the voting methods that are absolutely the MOST subject to tactical mahipulation? I'm not sure when I or other voting methods experts with a skeptical eye will have time to do the kind of review this article needs, but in the mean time Wiki readers need to be warned that it is biased. Tbouricius (talk) 15:23, 11 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the article has a lot of problems. The POV tag is appropriate. Let's work on it! By the way, as to history, substantial editing on this article was done by one of the sock puppets blocked in the Instant-runoff voting affair earlier this fall. --Abd (talk) 22:03, 11 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, even if I am a sock! SockPuppetForTomruen (talk) 22:41, 11 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ruen was blocked too, at one point. but only by a humorless administrator. Well, really, I suppose the admin can be forgiven for wanting to confirm that SockPuppetForTomruen was actually a sock puppet for Tomruen; unfortunately, I think the admin blocked the suspected sock's IP address, i.e., Ruen's IP. Anyway, socks are welcome, *but* not for contentious edits, probably -- however, an identified sock isn't a problem *at all*. --Abd (talk) 00:21, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As to Tideman's analysis, well.... let's say that I haven't seen any confirmation of that. Now, googling I find an interesting article.... rangevoting.org/TidemanRespA.html. The language seemed pretty familiar, then I look at the top .... yes, indeed, I did write this, and Smith took it and put it up on the site. Is that "peer review"? (Well, of a kind, but no cigar.) This is about Tideman's views on Range, but they are related, for "strategy" in Approval consists of voting it like sincere Plurality, whereas, supposedly, suckers will add approvals for other than their favorite. When criterion failures and strategy are being considered by IRV advocates, and the Favorite betrayal criterion, for example, is pointed out, they will argue, in return, that such failures would be rare in practice, which is true *in a two-party system*. Yet when it comes to criticizing Approval, they cry "vulnerable to strategy." What is this strategy? Vote for your favorite! Uh, isn't that a sincere vote? The fact is that there is no clear definition of sincere vote in Approval, other than not reversing preference, and Approval never rewards preference reversal. Same with Range. Mr. Bouricius must be aware of this, it is the core of the Majority Criterion problem and whether or not Approval passes that Criterion, and we have discussed this much elsewhere.

When Approval students discuss Approval voting strategy, it is to consider methods of where in a preference order to set an "approval cutoff." It does not mean insincere voting, which is what it means with all ranked methods.

The conditions where Approval does not elect a majority favorite are only those where two candidates gain a majority. Is it possible to imagine this happening in anything close to a two-party system? It requires that many voters vote for the two frontrunners, like Bush and Gore.

Then there is rangevoting.org/RichieRV.html. This is Warren Smith's own response to a critique of Range and Approval by Rob Richie. I'd say its worth reading, for sure.

Now, what does Tideman actually write about Approval strategy? I'm not at all sure what source Bouricius has in mind, but, from Collective Decisions in Voting, 2006:

The general strategy that works under Approval voting is to identify the two options that are most likely to win, and give only one of them a vote. This involves "burying" the less attractive option if one had been inclined to vote for it, and "directly hoisting" the more attractive option if one had been inclined not to vote for it.

Tideman then proceeds to consider the susceptibility of Approval Voting to this "strategy."

First of all, the "general strategy that works" isn't precisely what Tideman says. It's just a bit more than that. I.e., one votes for the two frontrunners as he describes, but, then, also votes for any other candidate whom one prefers to the preferred frontrunner. So, presumably, the Nader supporter votes for Gore, which is what Tideman describes, but also for Gore.

For major party supporters, the strategy is to bullet vote. In a two party system, or with two major candidates, therefore, we might expect most voters to bullet vote. As the experience with *some* Bucklin elections shows, this is common; likewise, it's been asserted that a flaw in Approval is that most voters will vote for only one candidate, as with the IEEE tactical application of Approval. (It appears that Approval was implemented, not to enhance democracy, but to head off a possible vote-splitting problem that could have lead to the loss of a board-supported candidate; then, when the danger was past, approval was rescinded because it could then allow dissident candidates some traction. The argument that it was rescinded because most voters bullet voted is preposterous. That's expected when there are two major candidates, it is a sincere vote and it is rational and strategically effective.)

This is the strategy that Tideman finds Approval "vulnerable to." Sincere voting, with a realistic approval cutoff. Consider the election Tideman is considering, but let's make it clear: there are only two candidates. How does Tideman's comment apply? Is it "burying" to not vote for the less attractive one? Or "directly hoisting" the more attractive one if one was not pleased that there is no better candidate? No, it is simply doing what elections do: choose between options.

Now, this commentary is, in at least some senses, Original Research. We can't just take this and put it into the article; but, I would submit, the arguments here, the important ones, are directly verifiable. I don't think we need to find a peer-reviewed source that points out that voters will only rarely vote for both frontrunners in an Approval election, in order to understand that it's true. The French report that Smith refers to, though, is available. Likewise, I think Tideman says the same thing.

In any case, Tideman's description of Approval being particularly vulnerable to strategy is quite strange. Note that Bouricius used the term "tactical voting." The Wikipedia article Tactical voting defines it as: "Tactical voting (or strategic voting or sophisticated voting) occurs when a voter supports a candidate other than his or her sincere preference in order to prevent an undesirable outcome."

Now, what does "support" mean? Let me give some examples: suppose I prefer some relatively unknown person to fill a political office. I can write in his name. But, instead, I vote for a candidate on the ballot. That's tactical voting. Suppose I'm voting in an IRV election, and I really only like one candidate. But I fear that this candidate will not win, so I add a second preference vote for a candidate whom I don't like, but I prefer to a third candidate whom I fear will win. That's tactical voting. In Approval, I vote for my Favorite, but, because my Favorite is not likely to win, I add a vote for my preferred frontrunner. Again, that's tactical voting.

Yet "tactical voting" is used as if it were some indictment of the practice. What it really means is that the voter considers not only his or her personal preferences, but also the realities of the situation. In small direct democracies, choices are made as a process of negotiation, where the individual and collective preferences interact, often with a seeking of supermajority approval. In large democracies, however, elections are used, but it is not particularly desirable to collect raw preferences from voters that have no relation to the social context. If one were to somehow build a machine that could extract from me my personal preferences to be amalgamated with others, there would be a problem: my personal preferences are idiosyncratic, and my top one hundred list for President might not include the common candidates on other's lists.

We truncate our list and combine it with what we know of others, most notably as expressed by the limited choices on the ballot. Because this involves compromises, it is "tactical voting." If I voted with true sincerity, I would write in a name at each rank, probably, and I'd probably exhaust the ranks before getting to anyone actually on the ballot.

With all ranked methods, tactical voting involves preference reversal. With Plurality, for example, tactical voting involves voting for a candidate when one prefers another, and not voting for one's favorite, and that is preference reversal. It is, thus, misleading, to use the term "tactical voting" with respect to Approval, when the vote *is not insincere*, it is simply a choice made by the voter of where to place an Approval cutoff. What I approve does, indeed, depend on what I think I can get. --Abd (talk) 04:39, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You were recently in an edit war with a banned user, removing these references which apparently discuss the same subject:

• Niemi, R.G. (1984) "The Problem of Strategic Behavior under Approval Voting" American Political Science Review 78(4) pp. 952-958.
• Saari, D.G. and Van Newenhizen, J. (2004) "Is approval voting an ‘unmitigated evil?’ A response to Brams, Fishburn, and Merrill" Public Choice 59(2) pp. 133-147.

So, clicking on those links, which are clearly peer-reviewed sources there are some pretty harsh criticisms, such as, "AV is one of the most susceptible systems to manipulation by small groups of voters (for example, small, maverick groups could determine the AV outcome)." How do you respond to those critiques? MilesAgain (talk) 04:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My response: "Huh?"

It's late, but I suppose I can say more. There are "peer-reviewed" criticisms of Approval that clearly did not involve "peer review" by election methods experts. We'd have to look at the specifics, but the claim repeated above is way outside of what is generally accepted about Approval. If I had time, I'd look at the sources, but, instead, I'd invite some more information to be brought here. *How* is Approval, allegedly, so "vulnerable to manipulation." As an example of the patent nonsense that is sometimes bandied about regarding Approval, "vulnerability to tactical voting" is common. What is "tactical voting" in Approval? Voting for your favorite is one form. Another is adding a vote for a frontrunner so that your vote won't be moot. So what's the claim here?

I can't tell, because the articles aren't accessible without payment.... and I can't travel to a library that would have them. Maybe someday.

I gotta love the "peer-reviewed" title of that second article: "Is approval voting an 'unmitigated evil'?" When did you stop beating your wife? Put it another way, if the answer is Yes or No: Yes, it is unmitigated, pure evil, invention of the grand panjandrum himself, calculated to destroy humanity in a single stroke by allowing a voter to actually cast a vote for more than one alternative, horrors! Or, No, it's mitigated by being mostly not used, if any organization is so unfortunate as to actually use it, it will vanish in a sulfurous cloud of smoke. --Abd (talk) 05:13, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

To MilesAgain: As Abd pointed out, neither of your references is available free. Since I am very poor, this means that I cannot read them to verify their truth. Please summarize the arguments here (in your own words, to avoid copyright infringement) so that I can decide whether they are rational or not. Thank you. JRSpriggs (talk) 07:37, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

How about if we start by cleaning up the strategy section. There is a lot of unreferenced assertions, many of which may simply be untrue. I'm tagging a number of statements in the section that need verification and/or citation. I consider them candidates for deletion unless someone thinks they can be salvaged. I'm also ready to delete some of the speculation or nonsubstantial assertions, such as the last two sentences of paragraph 2, maybe the whole paragraph. Similary, the third paragraph can be reduced to the first two-thirds of its first sentence less the "essentially". The Condorcet loser example is overly narrow and obscure, all it takes is for voters to bullet vote. Let me know which parts of this you think can be salvaged but you just need some extra time before I start cleaning up. DCary (talk) 05:35, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note the citations above in this section. MilesAgain (talk) 23:13, 7 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I restructured and improved parts of the strategy section. The last two paragraphs about Condorcet just before the example still need some work. They should probably be moved to another section, Effect on elections for example. The information from Laslier needs to be more accurately presented if it is kept. The information from Brams needs some qualification to make it NPOV. DCary (talk) 21:27, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have tagged a number of items in the article that are candidates for improvement or removal. Some explanatory notes:

• What is approval voting? Brams defines it. Claims that anything else is approval voting need similar quality citation. Otherwise it should be distinguished as not being approval voting. Claims of equivalency need to be supported.
• Claims about the benefits of approval voting need to be supported by citations.
• Suggestions for extending/modifying approval voting and/or using such modifications in non-election situations need citation, in part to distinguish them from OR. This is particularly true of the discussions of so-called multi-winner approval voting and approval polling, both of which I would consider as candidates for deletion.

DCary (talk) 21:27, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As to claims of equivalency, when a fact may be verified simply by looking at the definitions of things, or the uncontested consequences of what is known, it is not necessary to cite a source for it. Now, if someone wants to challenge an equivalency or analogy, to claim that the elements are *not* equivalent or analogous, then we'd have to see if there is any basis for this, or if, alternatively, it's a mere attempt to exclude explanatory text from the article on the technical grounds of a lack of specific source. In the absence of actual contention, I'm not going to give examples yet; I'd prefer to let someone who thinks one of the similarity or equivalency claims in the article is not verifiable by the kind of examination I've described propose it and explain why. Brams indeed defines Approval voting, but then generalizes the term. For example, he claims that various professional societies have adopted Approval Voting. By going to their bylaws, you can see what they do. It is not Yes/No voting, it's simply allowing each voter to vote for as many candidates as they like, even though only one is going to win. Another way of stating this is that such a method assumes No for all candidates not voted Yes. Or that marking a candidate is voting Yes and not marking the candidate is voting No. --Abd (talk) 03:46, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If it helps move us to actually improving article, please consider each of the items I tagged as contested as to some combination of accuracy and/or neutrality. Rashly deleting the tags without any improvements to the article is not constructive, nor is offering insinuations about my intentions. Those tags should be restored. Deleting the tags does not make the content uncontested, it only reduces the opportunity for others to see that there are problems and for others to have a chance to offer their improvements. Deleting the tags without any improvements suggests a willingness to vouch for the 100% accuracy and neutrality of the content. I'd have been happy to further explain the reasons for any of the tags, if you had indicated your interest. I'll mention a few as starters and will follow up with more as appropriate.

• The source provided later in the article does not support the assertion in the second paragraph of the introduction that approval voting is used to select the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In fact, that reference supports the opposite: repeated approval polling, not voting in an election, is recommended as a part of a consensus building process in preparation for a non-approval election to nominate a candidate for the post. The tagged, unreferenced statement in the introduction is significantly misleading if that reference is the only basis for its support. The statement later in the article makes a different claim that is more appropriate.

• The non-equivalence of voting for none, 1, or more versus voting for those candidates one approves of is recognized and is a distinction Abd himself has promoted. For example, even when there are just two candidates, I might vote wisely, even sincerely in some sense, for exactly one candidate, even though in another sense I don't approve of either one.

• Given the first non-equivalence, it is unclear which of the two is being referred to by the second equivalence. Further more, the equivalency of either to range voting is at best ambiguous since range voting itself offers multiple ways to count votes and declare winners, even if voters vote are allowed to vote only values of 0 and 1. Also there is the whole issue about what is considered a sincere vote and how that may change depending on what a ballot is interpreted to mean. This mention of sincere voting shouldn't be taken as an invitation to resolve here the issues about sincere voting, rather it should only serve as a reminder as to what an unrestricted claim of equivalency should be able to handle.

DCary (talk) 08:15, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There was no intention to comment at all on the motives of Mr. Cary. I mentioned a possible bad faith situation as a purely hypothetical situation, not one that had arisen, and I apologize for the inadvertent implication. As to the substance, each issue is separate. To separate this from the old POV section discussion, I'll open up a new section at the end of this page with subsections for each issue. Before moving on, though, I just want to say, about removing the tags, that I don't ordinarily do that without discussion unless I change the text to something that I think should not require a citation or I provide a citation. I'm not sure why I did it that way this time, beyond what I wrote in the summaries or above, I may have been confused about how long they had been there. Any user who thinks that what is wrong with the text is that it needs a citation is welcome to place a cn tag again, and any user who thinks the text is incorrect is, of course, welcome to change it. I would not ordinarily place a cn tag on text I think is incorrect, unless it's merely a suspicion and there is no source. --Abd (talk) 01:15, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

[ This thread is continued in the Unsourced text in article section. DCary (talk) 07:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC) ][reply]

As far as I can tell from a quick look, all of the concerns in this section have been addressed. So I removed the POV tag. MilesAgain (talk) 02:02, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Look again, both more carefully and more broadly. The removal (diff) of the POV tag was premature and precipitate. There are a number of outstanding NPOV issues with the article, some of them documented and/or recently commented on before, in, and after this section, while others undoubtedly have not yet been specifically mentioned. The removal of the tag was undermined by the unsourced or POV-laden edits that followed (for example, diff, diff), including some (from diff to diff) that seem oblivious to some recent discussions aimed at improving accuracy and neutrality. The nature of NPOV disputes should discourage quick, unilateral action in removing the tag. Better instead to first continue improving the article, demonstrate some NPOV stability in the article, then seek and achieve some consensus on this page about removal of the tag. DCary (talk) 19:07, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, I was being a little WP:BOLD. Do you feel that any of those edits you provide diffs for introduce POV problems? I feel quite strongly that they are all completely neutral. Would you please make a brief list of the specific NPOV problems you believe remain? MilesAgain (talk) 17:46, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate boldness and occasionally practice it myself. There is a knack for knowing where boldness is appropriate. You make many good contributions, some of them are bold. As to your questions: 1) yes, I do think the edits I provided diffs for certainly involved and compounded, if not introduced, POV problems; that's why I pointed them out; 2) yes, I did, see my previous comment. Perhaps that was too brief. So, do you want a brief list or a complete list? Kept up-to-date? Reiterating or summarizing the points of views and assessements from me and others? So other editors don't have to read what other editors have recently said on the issues? I'm not volunteering for that. In my previous comment, I offered some suggestions on how to find some of the outstanding NPOV issues. I'll note that I also suspect every one of the "historical" examples in Uses section has some NPOV problems. One could also read through the article and find the existing fact tags. Or just note all the claims made without referencing a reliable source, making particular note of those claims that might be controversial. Other starting points would be to write some comments in and relating to the existing discussion explaining how the recent changes to the first sentence (now first two sentences) in the article were "all completely neutral." Or start a new section that describes how making an edit change (boldly, but without prior discussion or consensus), hinging on value judgements of what one editor thought was more important and less important, is an example of making completely neutral point of view changes. DCary (talk) 06:32, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to see a specific list of the outstanding NPOV issues, with clear reference to the text in dispute for each, including those issues that I may have contributed to, please. It would be very helpful to have something more than references to other unspecific sections of this talk page. My understanding that POV issues usually pertain to the wording of the article body text, and much less often to the citations or lack thereof. As for the first paragraph, here is what I did:

Where is the neutrality issue? MilesAgain (talk) 11:41, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes improving the wording of an article has NPOV implications, sometimes it doesn't. Avoiding unintended consequences requires some understanding of the NPOV issues.

NPOV disputes are about which points of view are presented in the article and how they are presented. The resolution to those issues depends heavily on the points of view that are expressed in reliable sources. A point of view does not qualify for inclusion in an article just because an editor subscribes to POV or knows people who do. Once sources are identified, editors can evaluate them for reliability, examine their content, and make decisions about whether and how to include in the article any material based on the sources. Asking for reliable sources can help provide a good basis for establishing consensus about NPOV and can help avoid irrelevant discussion.

I'll address a specific point of concern in the Talk: subsection where it had been recently discussed. DCary (talk) 04:34, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The silly Binary terminology was added by an anonymous Approval-supporter overriding my efforts to organize the election methods with a one vote category on the Voting system page, replacing another silly yes/no category. [11] The anonymous swarm wouldn't accept that one vote systems existed, so they came up with a binary category to make approval fit in with plurality because they can both use identical ballots. (I guess it was changed from yes/no because that implied 2 types of marks, while he wanted to make it clear it was mark/no-mark binary.) Of course all nonsense since (1) plurality doesn't need a binary ballot and (2) approval can use a 2-mark ballot as well as a 1-mark ballot.) Happy editing! Tom Ruen (talk) 18:14, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Binary" was added to this article very recently by Dcary[12]. However, I assume he simply found the category and used it. It *usually* is binary (as is Plurality), that is, for each candidate the voter has two options: a vote, or no vote. (But, of course, if abstentions have a different effect than No, then we have three options. Otherwise the explicit No is dicta or there for non-electoral purposes or security.) The only difference between Plurality and Approval is the restriction in Plurality requiring, effectively, a No vote (blank is the same as No) on all candidates but one. I really consider Plurality and Approval to be the same basic system, and in parliamentary practice, with direct voting by persons, sequentially, they are the same. (But where votes are recorded member by member, an objection *might* be raised. Anyone ever see this? It is with written ballots that the difference pops up.) Perhaps I should take a look at the category debate. I do think "binary" a useful classification. "one vote" is ambiguous -- or different from binary. --Abd (talk) 18:56, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is NONSENSE to call plurality a binary method unless there's only one choice. Binary implies 2 responses per choice, which is 2^n possible votes, while plurality has n possible votes. It's an accident of ballot design convenience that plurality and approval share ballot types. Original plurality voting, everyone has ONE MARK, whether writing a name on a paper ballot, or physically voting with their bodies by moving around a room to represent their vote. There's nothing binary about it at all. Only approval can offer this claimed term. Tom Ruen (talk) 21:37, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, this essentially asks me to look at this in a very picky way. What is the source for "binary"? How is the article improved by having it in the introductory definition? Take out "binary" entirely? Why would this make any difference? As has been noted, Approval may be seen as a special case of Range Voting, with binary votes; however, the reverse is also obviously true: Range Voting is Approval with fractional votes allowed. Range Voting and Approval Voting are rather artificially divided, based on history. The people who started promoting Range thought of Range as involving higher resolution, such as 0.0 - 10.0 used in Olympic scoring (and Warren Smith would prefer real numbers in the range of 0-1, and that is what his simulations -- and those of some others -- use in estimating performance of elections, though I think the actual votes are reduced to the allowed resolution). The core definition of Approval is that the voter expresses an action of approval or disapproval (the latter often by default) for each candidate. It's true that in practice, the term Approval is limited to binary votes, and Range is used for higher resolution. There is a blended case, though, which is Range 2, one step up from Approval, where voters cast Yes/No votes, but abstentions have an effect. There are thus three votes; typically the No votes are subtracted from the Yes votes. Thus the three possible votes are -1, 0, +1. This is what is used for some Wikipedia polling, as an example. ArbComm elections are not actually determined by the poll results, the complete results, as is, which do not declare winners, is then advice to Jimbo Wales. He could decide, if he wanted, to use average vote, or net positive vote, or maximum Yes vote. From this choices, though, it appears he is using net positive vote, which makes it Range 2 in practice. (Range 1 is Approval). Because the actual votes are Yes/No and are independent for each candidate, however, most would call this an Approval election. This is the introduction, and some pickiness is appropriate for it. I don't see "binary" as necessary, I'd leave the subtle ambiguity, or explicitly explain it. Since the explanation might be considered original research (though it's pretty obvious and thus might be defensible), I'd not put that in the introduction, for sure.

Then the other picky point. With Range Voting, there are two basic ways of determining the winner: Sum of votes and average vote. Averaging can be used with Approval just the same (same reason for doing it, same problem with doing it). Averaging probably improves the outcome as long as there is some rule preventing write-in votes from automatically winning! -- but this has never been shown conclusively, it's just an opinion that some Range Voting supporters have. (Averaging in Approval is a little like IRV discarding moot votes (not for the top two) and not considering them as part of the basis for a majority. Again, Approval Voting can (and probably will) be used together with a majority requirement, with further process (runoff, exhaustive balloting with or without eliminations) ensuing if there is majority failure. This would probably be the most common exception to what the introduction reads. If Approval is implemented in the U.S. for public elections, my guess is that the first implementations will be as runoff replacements (as is happening with IRV), but with Approval, I'd assume that the majority requirement would remain. It has not with IRV, I believe, primarily because IRV has been oversold as a runoff *replacement*, and that it can fail to find a majority hasn't been a factor in the debates; as I've written elsewhere, the voter information pamphlet, in the putatively neutral summary, explicitly stated that "a winner will still be required to gain a majority." That is directly contrary to what the proposition actually did, unless we accept that a final round majority is a true majority, and, as I've pointed out, we might as well say that unanimity is required under the new system; just take it one more round, and it will always show unanimity for the IRV winner.

In any case, Approval with a majority requirement, Approval with No votes subtracted from Yes votes, Approval with vote averaging, all would be called (and I think are called, but I haven't searched) "Approval." Key, again: independent voting for each candidate, in a manner that expresses "Approval" -- in the action sense, not necessarily the emotional or moral sense -- in the range of 0-1, or reducible to that range. (Yes - No Approval has votes of -1, 0, +1, which linearly maps to 0, 0.5, 1, so the social ordering from one is exactly the same as the social ordering from the other, these are all "one vote, one person" systems. (And there are other possibilities twittering out at the fringes of what people discuss).

The fractional vote issue is quieted by simply leaving out "binary." Most people will, in fact, assume binary votes, we don't have any habit of thinking of fractional votes (even though that is what Olympic scoring is).

The issue of determining the winner could be covered by weaseling it: The winner is generally the candidate receiving the most votes. Contrary to some expressions I've seen, weasel words are quite appropriate for introductions, so that a summary can remain accurate, fairly distilling the rest of the article; in this case, the exceptions should be mentioned in the article, and the notable one would be that a majority might be required, hence the one with the most votes might not win in the primary, and could lose in subsequent process. I think we have to remember that voting systems are not only used in government and, in fact, the vast majority of elections are held outside of government, in countless organizations. Robert's Rules would clearly suggest a majority requirement. (It appears to prohibit Approval Voting, but, in fact, it merely instructs clerks to discard overvoted ballots because they are obvious "errors." There is no rule prohibiting overvoting in elections by show of hands or rising, only with written ballots does the problem appear. So, for written ballots, any organization could specifically allow Approval voting, and, as we know, some significant ones have.

--Abd (talk) 16:54, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The first wikilinked paragraph from the phrase containing "binary" says, "Binary voting systems are those in which a voter either votes or does not vote for a given candidate." I've never heard the term "binary" applied to voting systems, so I added a fact tag, and I'm going to remove it from the intro sentence here because it doesn't say anything that the rest of the paragraph doesn't. MilesAgain (talk) 17:57, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good points and good edit. Such are the pitfalls of my relying on and replicating material from other pages that is not demonstrated to be supported by reliable sources. DCary (talk) 04:34, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that it was premature to remove it. An action like that should be *explicitly* approved by the active editors, even only one who, with a sustainable assumption of good faith, objects, should be enough to keep the tag, pending further process. There should be, however, a specific and active list of POV issues, either text in the article that should not be there, or missing text that should be there, but perhaps we haven't yet come to consensus on it. So if anyone thinks the tag should remain, please start a new section below with a specific list of issues. At least one! It does not have to be complete, more can be added later, but we need something to work on. (I could identify possible POV issues, indeed, but it's a matter of available time.) Further, not all editors check their watchlist every day. Time should be allowed. *At least* a week! More would be better. I appreciate the apparent intention of MilesAgain, but ... not quite yet.

--Abd (talk) 19:56, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Creating new sections for issues that have been discussed recently elsewhere on this page may only fracture the discussion. In many cases, I'd prefer to build on what we have than start anew. I agree about expecting quick responses and being limited by available time. I'm not volunteering to start lists or keep them up-to-date for people who can't find the numerous issues themselves or don't have time to even list their own issues. Creating lists would also tend to encourage more fractured discussions by discouraging consideration of what has already been said. There is a lot of discussion to keep track of. In the big picture, concise, well-considered, and edited writing is the ultimate time saver. It is considerate writing as well. I'll continue my work on NPOV issues, necessarily not all at once, keeping in mind that much of the effort does not involve writing on Wikipedia. DCary (talk) 06:32, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Has there been discussion of Approval/STV Hybrids? By this I mean using Approval-style check boxes, but fractionalizing the vote if the voter selects more than one, and then using STV algorithm by eliminating candidates from the bottom and thus recombining such divided votes on the strongest continuing candidate. One fellow, Bill Baldwin of Kansas describes the concept like this...

"Another possibility of using limited STV is the idea of allowing the voters several votes. That is, if N positions are to be filled, and there are M candidates (M > N) to fill the positions, then allow everyone to vote for however many candidates they want in the usual fashion. That means, the candidates voted for are simply checked. Then run STV with all the checked candidates having a rank of one, and all the unchecked candidates as having a rank of two."

I haven't analyzed this to see if it avoids any of the problems I have with Approval (e.g. the election of an inoffensive, but in fact poor candidate who few voters know much about, or actually support, who gets hoisted by the "any-but" strategy of a polarized electorate), but wonder if anyone else has done such an analysis. Tbouricius (talk) 15:50, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I definitely would NOT call this an approval' system at all. I've explored such methods for many years, long supporting the option of tied-ranks counted as an equally split vote, like Equal-and-even Cumulative voting, so as a limit of one ranking allowed and split a vote among choices marked. It's also useful in cases where ballots can't support sufficient ranking slots. Of course there'd be more lost votes in the process over a rank STV. I'd call it maybe unranked-IRV or unranked-STV. My primary intuitive attraction to such a system would be that strategic compromise is expressed as a tied-preference rather than a betrayal. I've heard suggestions that this approach would allow overvotes of plurality to be counted, better than throwing away overvotes, but a poor solution when you don't know voter intent. Tom Ruen (talk) 17:25, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad to see Tbouricius exploring alternative election methods other than IRV. The proposal to fractionate the vote, without some recombination, has often been proposed to deal with the alleged violation of one-person, one-vote, but without recombination, it is essentially strategic suicide to cast divided votes. Approval, as it is, is really a form of alternative vote, i.e., voting for two is "I vote for this one if that vote is moot, and for that one if this vote is moot, and if it happens that the election is a face-off between these two, I'm accepting either one, which is an abstention in terms of choosing a winner, *but* a vote for either one if a majority of valid ballots is required to complete the election." In the end, only one vote *at most* actually counts.

Note that Range Voting is nothing more than Approval with fractional votes allowed. Thus, in the presence of strong voter polarization or partisan intensity, it reduces to Approval which reduces to Plurality.

I have many times proposed, though, a different kind of hybrid. Besides my own idea, one already exists. Bucklin voting. This is a ranked method, of course, which uses simple vote addition to bring in second and lower rank votes. There is a known form called ER-Bucklin which allows multiple votes at all ranks (whereas the Duluth system only allowed multiple votes in the third rank.)

Bucklin, of course, clearly satisfies the Majority Criterion, however we might slice it. ER-Bucklin doesn't satisfy the mind-reading version (i.e., the one that depends on a "preference list" that is not how the voters actually vote), but it could be argued that *in substance* it does, since Bucklin does not, under realistic election assumptions, create the alleged motive to bullet-vote "insincerely," that is, the bugaboo of multiple majorities, thus the failure of a majority first preference, can only occur if a significant number of voters vote for both frontrunners. In a three-way race, behavior gets more complex, to be sure, but, still, multiple majorities remain a "problem" that I wish we had.

There was a form of Bucklin that used fractional votes. It was ruled unconstitutional in Oklahoma, and I think I agree with that result, but I've been unable to find the actual text of that decision.

What I propose, though, is different. The ballot might look like a regular ranked one, but a vote in any rank is, for an Approval result, considered a vote for the candidate. (Though, possibly, there could be additional, non-approval ranks, I have not looked at that.) However, the ballots are analyzed by preference to see if there is a candidate who beats the Approval winner. If not, done (at least if the Approval winner got a majority, or if only a plurality is required, which I dislike, as does Roberts Rules). If so, then there is a runoff between the Approval winner and the preference winner.

Election simulations show that with sincere votes, the Approval winner is quite likely to be the Condorcet (pairwise) winner. Of course, "sincere" is difficult to define for Approval. Nevertheless, we can predict that in the vast majority of elections, Approval will choose a Condorcet winner or at least a member of a Condorcet cycle.

However, I interpret bullet voting as meaning "I would rather have to vote in a runoff than see any candidate other than my Favorite elected." There is no reason to suppose that it is *ever* insincere. Thus I'm quite put off by criticisms of Approval on the basis that it "encourages tactical voting," when, in fact, with Approval, this means "voting for your favorite." Or, more to the point, voting for a frontrunner in addition to your favorite -- but for most people in a two-party system, it's the former, i.e., bullet voting. With pure ranked methods, equal ranking not allowed, such as ordinary IRV, tactical voting *always* means preference reversal, i.e., ranking a less-preferred candidate above a more-preferred one.

Another easy hybrid that has not received the attention it might deserve is IRV with equal ranking allowed, and possibly with Coombs' method elimination, which is far more likely not to pass over a pairwise winner. Coombs method eliminates candidates, like IRV, but it handles the eliminations first with the *lowest* ranked votes.

--Abd (talk) 20:44, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree Coombs' method is effectively an approval system, counting votes for all except last rank, not that I see any virtue in Coombs' method. Tom Ruen (talk) 20:52, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that borda count is an approval method, OR that approval is a specialized borda count [weights: 1,1,1,1...] OR maybe better that approval/borda are both specialized range voting. Well, it seems useful to me to group like-methods together.

I got in my first wikiwar with IPs when I started here with voting system page, tried to group methods as one-vote vs multivote, and the approval-lovers jumped in and called plurality/approval as yes/no methods because of the checkbox ballot types! (Rather than putting approval with range voting) [13] Admittingly my groupings were half-baked, and I still don't know if I can call Condorcet a one person, one vote system. Tom Ruen (talk) 19:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the field has come a way since then. Approval is *clearly* a Range method. However, it's also easy to look at it as "Plurality" as well. The whole one-person, one-vote problem can be finessed quite simply. If the ballot of a voter is disqualified, does it shift the election outcome by more than one vote? That is, is the vote count of the winner more than one vote less? If so, we know that the voter did not have more than one vote, in the sense that really counts. Cumulative voting does this, allows voters more than one vote. But all alternative vote systems do allow the voter to cast different *alternative* votes, and Approval is really also an alternative vote system. "I vote for A if B is not going to win, and at the same time I vote for B if A is not going to win, and I am not going to make or break a tie between A and B. Condorcet methods are *similar* without the tie-breaking restriction. --Abd (talk) 04:55, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

[ This section is a continuation of a thread in the POV tag section. DCary (talk) 07:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC)][reply]

Well, sort of. It's a consideration de novo, which is why I split it out, beginning with the comment below. Hope this is useful. --Abd (talk) 23:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You didn't treat this as a consideration de novo in your initial comments: it would be inconsistent for you respond to or critique my earlier comments in a true consideration de novo. In any case, I'm not supporting that invention either. DCary (talk) 04:13, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User:DCary placed some cn tags in the article in pieces of text that I had thought were simple equivalencies, obvious through definitions. I removed the tags, possibly in error in one or more cases, but this -- as cn tags will -- has raised the issues of the accuracy of these claims. My understanding of the principles involved is that Wikipedia text must not state as fact anything which cannot be verified by a reader through reliable sources; however, a limited amount of synthetic analysis, of an obvious nature from sourced facts, may be mentioned. As an example, if there is a list of jurisdictions in the United States which have adopted Instant Runoff Voting, and each item in this list is verifiable through reliable source, and there are, say, twelve jurisdictions on the list, an article could claim that there are at least twelve jurisdictions in the United States which have adopted IRV, even if no reliable source can be found that makes that claim. It's verifiable from present evidence by any reader. How far a reader may be expected to go to do the synthesis involved is an open question, as far as I know. It should not involve, however, expertise or advanced knowledge, that much is in the guidelines. Now, to the issues:

[ The preceding section introduction and the start of the first subsection were added by Abd (talk) at 02:36, 21 January 2008 (UTC) as part of a single signed comment. I am taking the liberty of splitting the two parts and continuing the section introduction as its own thread. If there are objections or suggestions about how to better handle this kind of situation, please say so. DCary (talk) 20:00, 21 January 2008 (UTC) ][reply]

I don't see any problem. --Abd (talk) 23:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is perhaps best to review Wikipedia policy on original research at the source. According to that policy, synthesis is original research. Wikipedia policy defines synthesis more specifically and more narrowly than the general sense that Abd apparently uses above.

Wikipedia distinquishes synthesis (not allowed) from summarization of ?reliable? sources (allowed and encouraged). The example Abd gives is clearly summarization. However, in cases where there are no sources, there is no opportunity for summarization. Flexibility is practiced, but too often at the expense of quality, as this and many other articles on Wikipedia demonstrate. DCary (talk) 20:00, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. The problem is pretty extensive with the Voting systems articles, because there is widespread development of the field, and expressed expertise, that seems to be happening outside the loop of peer-reviewed publication and other reliable source. That's changing, slowly, and I am, in fact, outside of Wikipedia, working on the problem, by setting up, hopefully, a peer-review system that takes advantage of the distributed expertise of the internet.

Many of the voting systems articles appear to have been written by participants in a project that is described on electowiki.[14] These articles were written by people familiar with the topics, and, as is common with articles written by experts but not for formal publication, they are unsourced. However, *usually*, they represent broad consensus. If we just toss the material out, we lose what is actually pretty solid. Complicating this is that there are political movements which have an agenda, and part of that agenda is discrediting what are seen as "rival" voting systems. There has been a fairly coherent effort, over the last year, to remove from Wikipedia articles, for example, on election criteria, through AfD or merge. These articles, often having been written by one or a very few editors, aren't well watched, and AfDs went through that removed what are actually notable topics, such as Summability criterion. The AfD for Favorite betrayal criterion actually succeeded, but an editor simply recreated it and it survived the next AfD because, at last, someone was watching.

My policy in dealing with article text is not to remove it merely because it is not sourced, particularly if it is a matter of common knowledge. Essentially, there is a lot of work to do on the articles, and what is common knowledge and not really controversial shouldn't be the first priority! Further, what is published in the field is actually, generally, biased in a certain way. Access to publications is affected by politics. My favorite example, currently, is the article by Nagel on the Burr dilemma, which is an interesting article in the history it presents; unfortunately, Nagel's application of the historical situation is thoroughly tenuous and speculative, but its having been published in a peer-reviewed publication creates a problem. Nobody in the field that I know, and I know quite a few, accepts Nagel's analysis. But what is published to the contrary? I'm hampered by not having access to the journals -- most of the current articles in the field are being published in journals that don't have free public access. I managed to get a copy of Nagel's article, which is how I know how truly preposterous it is. (This actually is relevant to this article, because the Nagel article gets used periodically to assert Nagel's theory of strategic vulnerability of Approval voting as if it were fact.)

The article has, in the introduction,

Approval Voting is used to select the Secretary-General of the United Nations

and in the body,

The selection of the Secretary-General of the United Nations has involved an Approval poll^[2]

Now, the citation on the body text was supplied by me.(diff), and I modified that language to reflect what the source indicated, so I'm gratified that Mr. Cary thinks it accurate. What about the introduction? Well, it is not accurate. Problem is, it is also, quite possibly, from a reliable source. Basically, Steven J. Brams has repeated that claim quite a few times, and at least one of these may have been in a peer-reviewed publication. My preference? Take it out. It does not need to be in the intro. It's actually a weak claim, it is not "used to select" the officer, it is used to prepare for the selection. It is *interesting* that Approval is used, and approval polls can be extraordinarily useful compared to "vote for your favorite polls," they can rapidly narrow to the most broadly acceptable candidate(s), making deliberative process more efficient, and I've seen them function that way. So, essentially, my view of the best solution here is not to tag it, but to remove it. *But* someone may well object; we can cross that bridge if we come to it.

This, by the way, is an example of the limitations of Wikipedia reliance on peer-reviewed publication as "reliable source." It's a mild one, and we would have to look at what, exactly, Brams says, his precise language as was peer-reviewed, which I'm not doing, but there is another, far worse example which was cited in this article previously, Nagel's paper on the Burr dilemma, which would never pass muster on Wikipedia if published here. But being published in a publication, supposedly peer-reviewed, which allowed him to make essentially preposterous claims, it can be cited as a source for us. The error he makes has actually been taken up and repeated by some who should know better, such as Warren Smith, who repeats Nagel's assertion that the first Presidents were elected by Approval Voting. Perhaps we should put this in this article? Approval voting was used to elect the first Presidents of the U.S.? I don't think so! Much as I would love that it were so! --Abd (talk) 02:36, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think we are likely to see a book appear any day, some of us have seen prepub copies that will say about exactly this. "Range voting" is a new terminology for an old method, Cardinal ratings. The introduction has:

Approval voting is a simple form of range voting, where the range that voters are allowed to express is extremely constrained: accept or not.

To put it in Range terms, the voter may vote 1, equivalent to accept, and 0, equivalent to not accepting the candidate. Mr. Cary raises the issue of various forms of Range voting and special rules that are sometimes proposed as part of the system, but this is sidestepped by the "form of Range voting," and those who promote Range voting universally -- as far as I know -- accept the claim that Approval is a form of Range, and I suspect that Brams does so likewise.

There are two basic forms of Range: sum of votes and average vote. Currently, the Center for Range Voting, much to my chagrin and that of some other Range supporters, promotes average Range. Approval is, of course, not equivalent to average range, but it is equivalent to sum-of-votes Range, and students of Range, again universally, accept sum-of-votes as a form of Range, and all the theoretical work on simulations has been done with *no* study of the effect of abstentions, which is where sum-of-votes and average deviate, otherwise they are totally equivalent. If we have a Range ballot, used for a Range election, everything is set up to count it, and at the last minute there is a change in the rules: voters may only vote 100% or 0%, and we overprint the ballots so that the intermediate ratings can't be used, the Range system could be used to count the ballots, and it would be an Approval election.

Another way to look at this is that Plurality allows voters one vote per office, Approval allows voters one vote per candidate. And Range allows voters fractional votes, at most one full vote per candidate. It is that simple, unless someone tosses in the monkey wrench of using average vote instead of sum of votes, which creates a mess: what about a single voter who writes in a candidate and votes that candidate 100%? Oops! that candidate wins. So then a rule is needed, which CRV calls a "quorum" rule. It's arbitrary, and I've argued for years that if the proposal is average Range, it is certain to be shot down. *Later*, after there is usage of sum-of-votes Range, which is really a very simple progression beyond Approval, there *might* be some reason to consider average vote. I think it's a bad idea, though, for elections. Might be great for polling.

Now, could I find a reliable source that claims Approval is a form of Range? I can find *tons* of email comments and web sites, but I'm not sure that, until the book comes out, I could support that with reliable source. But it is *obvious*. Does anyone here actually claim that it isn't? It seems Mr. Cary did so above, but, frankly, I didn't follow it. He wrote:

The non-equivalence of voting for none, 1, or more versus voting for those candidates one approves of is recognized and is a distinction Abd himself has promoted. For example, even when there are just two candidates, I might vote wisely, even sincerely in some sense, for exactly one candidate, even though in another sense I don't approve of either one.

The term "approve" has two different meanings. One is an opinion, the other is an action. In the context of the method, it's an action, and it is exactly equivalent to "vote for." I have raised the distinction Mr. Cary mentions in considering what "sincere voting" means in Approval. I have, in fact, argued that to "approve" a candidate in this method, for an actual election, has little to do with the opinion, but rather with a decision that the voter makes and implements. But the *method* -- which is what this article is about -- cares nothing about whether the voter "approves" of the candidates or not, *unless* "approves" is a merely synonym for "votes for." It is the marks on the ballot that will be counted, they are actions, not sentiments, and if somebody tells Approval voters that they should vote for "all the candidates they approve of," they could be misleading them. Ballot instructions should not place sentimental meaning on votes! Rather, voters may, quite properly, use preferences and preference strengths to determine optimal votes for themselves, but these are irrelevant to the method -- though they do impact the theoretical analysis of how the method handles voter preference patterns and presumed modes of expression.

There are two basic forms of Approval Ballot: one with Yes/No for each candidate, and one where the voter may vote for a candidate or not (i.e, may simply not mark anything for that candidate). In most implementations of Approval, it is really only the Yes votes that are counted for the purposes of determining the winner, No votes are dicta, though they may aid in the prevention or detection of fraud. (In some applications, No votes are subtracted from Yes votes. This is actually a Range 2 method! (i.e., -1, 0, +1, with 0 being the default vote). Approval is Range 1. The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, thus, is using Range 2 voting.)

Bottom line: the comment of Mr. Cary does not bear on the operation of the method. Take a Range election and prevent all votes except the top rating and the bottom one, and it is precisely an Approval election. (I'm assuming sum-of-votes Range, with abstentions the same as bottom ratings.)

Mr. Cary goes on to discuss Range more, but it seems he has missed something. Yes, there are various forms of Range. But what the article says is that Approval is "a form" of Range, not that it is "equivalent" to Range. However, where there is some variant on Range, there will be, in fact, normally, a corresponding equivalent with Approval. I.e., a form of Approval that is that variation, with the votes simply restricted to min and max. Average Range, for example, can be done with Approval, it is Average Approval. That's not what Brams proposed, certainly. But, as noted, Brams did not actually invent Approval, he studied it. And then Average Approval has exactly the same problem as Average Range: the single voter.... and thus, then, the need to define some minimum support. With polling, it doesn't matter, because polls only advise, and the analyst can take into account the number of voters involved.

I'll look around and see what I can find as a reliable or "semi-reliable" source. (The defacto situation is that *some* sources are routinely allowed that aren't fully qualified as "reliable source." That is unstable, though ... frequently it reflects the fact that the peer-reviewed journals are not available on-line unless one has connections or money). --Abd (talk) 02:36, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting on average of votes approach, apparently to allow votes without an opinion to not affect a candidate's rating. Approval does support this with 2-input ballot yes/no, like Image:Approvalballotchoice.png, so no mark means "no opinion" rather than "no approval". Tom Ruen (talk) 03:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The image doesn't say how the votes are counted. That kind of ballot is often proposed, but, in fact, it's only the Yes votes that count. If a voter votes "No," it prevents someone from adding a Yes vote, that's an argument that has been used. (This is one of the arguments used against Approval, that if it uses a standard plurality style ballot, a fraudster may add desired votes. However, it's true currently with the no-overvoting rule, that fraudsters may void undesired votes by adding marks, and there are allegations that something like that happened in Florida 2000. Six of one and a half-dozen of the other. There is no substitute for good ballot security.

Some fairly bright people have proposed the average-votes method for Range -- and, of course, it's the same thing with Approval -- but .... some other fairly bright people have claimed that this is an effective way to torpedo the whole thing, noting that it is a *separate* reform, and the *tradition* is essentially sum of votes, and we see this with conflicting initiatives. They are compared with sum of Yes votes, the No votes are only used to determine majority approval of the initiative. Yes/No ballots for candidate elections could also be used like that. Majority yes required to win, but ... winner has the most Yes votes. If the winner doesn't get majority yes (i.e, more Yes than No *for that candidate*) , the election fails (i.e., goes to further process). --Abd (talk) 04:00, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Right, a yes/no ballot helps detect undervoting to confirm voter intent and disable fraud. And an average-approval method (whatever you want to call it), could use 3-mark options yes/no/no-opinion. On the otherside, I still can't support a majority requirement in approval since multiple rounds of voting make it too easy to offer false votes, whether or not choices are eliminated, voters ought not to be influenced by unreliable previous approval counts. Tom Ruen (talk) 04:17, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

[ Just a reminder that it is helpful if editors follow Wikipedia's Talk page guidelines. There is a link to those guidelines at the top of each initial editing page of a Talk: page. I'll emphasize three points: keep on topic, stay objective, be concise. DCary (talk) 06:56, 21 January 2008 (UTC) ][reply]

Well, Wikipedia would, I think, like to encourage access to editing the encyclopedia by people with disabilities. I have ADHD, confirmed by many specialists. One of the consequences -- besides the ability to hyperfocus, which allows me to see what others can't see, sometimes -- is an inability to be initially concise. I have a good friend who is quite like me, but he is known as a concise writer. How does he do it? He takes about three or four times as long to write a piece. I can be concise, but it is extraordinarily inefficient. So, my suggestion to DCary is, don't read it if you don't want to. There is no obligation on any editor to read what I write. Talk is just Talk, and those who are bored by it may leave the room, they lose nothing but an opportunity to understand what I'm saying, and they will have future opportunities. I'm concise in edits, give summary explanations of edits. And if an actual dispute appears, I can and will retract to concise argument in Talk. I have not considered this a dispute. Yet. So, yes, it would be helpful. Sometimes another user appears who reads what I've written, apparently understanding it, and who summarizes it. If nobody understands and supports what I write.... well, perhaps I'm out on a limb. Or we haven't attracted enough participation yet. Where I am concise, by the way, is when I've developed a clear conclusion. When I'm *not* concise is, in fact, when I'm most objective, because I will include just about every POV that occurs to me, and I think dialectically, which drives some people crazy. --Abd (talk) 15:51, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There is some confusion, perhaps because the title of this subsection and the bulk of Abd's opening comment in this subsection appear to be misdirected at defending a statement that I have not challenged, a statement in the article's first paragraph. What I did challenge were the equivalencies claimed in the first two sentences in the Procedures section. Please refer back to my comments in the POV tag section for details. DCary (talk) 20:18, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was addressing, first, the general situation, and I avoided moving on to the text found deeper in the article. Now that Mr. Cary has specified more exactly what he is challenging, we can turn to that. This is the text of that section:

Each voter may vote for as many options as wanted, at most once per option. This is equivalent to saying that each voter may "approve" or "disapprove" each option by voting or not voting for it,[citation needed] and it's also equivalent to voting +1 or 0 in a range voting system.[citation needed] The option with the most votes after all votes are tallied wins.

There are two parts to this. Is Approval voting, the referent of the article, equivalent to each voter "approving" or "disapproving" of each option by voting or not voting for it. I don't know if I can find a text that requires no synthetic judgement, but the basic fact I noted above is that, if I'm correct, Brams applies the "Approval voting" label to elections where the voters use a standard ballot, without the No option, and also to elections where No is explicit. The example for the article, the image, shows a standard ballot, without the No. Which of these, is Mr. Cary objecting to? The second sentence is an *explanation* of the procedure, explaining the *name* of the method. I've argued many times that it is dangerous to consider the votes as "approval" of candidates, but this description is quite common, and it is, of course, implied in the name of the method. I don't call the method that, when I'm writing advocacy pieces -- or sometimes just for fun -- I call it "Count All the Votes." Should make a nice bumper sticker, don't you think? The idea that these votes are "approvals," based on some supposed internal state of the voter, is exactly where critics get off claiming strategic voting. But there is another meaning to approval. It can be an action rather than an opinion. And that is precisely what a vote for a candidate is. It is an action whereby the voter adds weight to the election of that candidate, for whatever reason.

As to the claim about Range equivalency. Range is a class of methods, with variable resolution, proposals span the "range" from (0,1), (-1,0,+1), (0,9), (0,100), etc. and Warren Smith would allow more resolution than that if he could get away with it. As I explained above, there is also average Range and sum-of-votes Range, and there can also be, in theory, other aspects to the method that alter its characteristics. Range Voting with voters voting absolute commensurable utilities is actually ideal for the purpose of maximizing overall satisfaction with the result, but, of course ... how do we do that? In some situations, it can happen. But normally, we expect that voters will vote according to various strategies, and, it turns out, the most successful Range method, better than ordinary Range -- which is pretty far ahead of all other methods according to the simulations -- is Range with top-two runoff. The point, though, is that there are all kinds of Range methods, but there is a basic concept of Range, it is what was known previously as Cardinal ratings. What it *boils* down to is allowing fractional votes. Approval is Range with no fractional votes allowed, that is really the most significant difference, and every other Range variation I've seen would have a corresponding Approval variation, and, again, I mentioned this above.

Range with ratings of 0 and 1 is Approval, Approval with fractional votes allowed is no longer called Approval, it's called Range. (A key point is that the vote for each candidate is *independent* from the vote for every other candidate. This is why both Range and Approval are, according to the older definitions with strategic voting meaning preference reversal, strategy proof. Borda count is "range-like," but with strict assignment of the "ratings." Range supporters *uniformly* -- actually I can think of one sort-of exception, someone who was promoting, as I recall (-1, 0, +1) Range and giving it a new name, consider Approval to be a Range method, which should explain a bit why the Center for Range Voting, in the actual political activism it supports, is promoting Approval Voting. It's the basic Range method. Approval advocates, as well, accept the definition of Approval as the simplest Range method. (Some of them think that basic approval is better than higher resolution Range because it forces the voter to consider and make the necessary compromises with political reality, though, in fact, in my opinion, the higher resolution forms really do the same. *Many* think that higher resolution Range is better than Approval, but also consider Approval to be the reform du jour because of its utter simplicity. Take a plurality ballot and simply stop tossing overvotes.

However, these communities are largely without peer-reviewed journals supporting them. The opinions are expressed on web pages around the internet. It's pretty easy to find out, personally, what the consensus is on a topic: just post to, say, the Election Methods mailing list with something contrary to it, you will see very quickly! (Post a question, "is this the consensus, you might get some answers, but for many readers it will be ho-hum.... People are more likely to respond to error than to what is correct.) So, problem is, there is nothing in this that satisfies WP:RS, *even though, in fact, there is more effective peer review of claims through the mailing list than there is in the editorial process for peer-reviewed publications -- at least some of them.* The true problem is that there is no mechanism for formal peer review, no "publication decision" by a publisher, whose reputation is at stake, which is why we consider peer-reviewed publication the gold standard for reliable source. (Well, actually, it's the silver standard. The gold standard is certain peer-reviewed or other responsibly-published review of the field that considers all the points of view. Secondary or tertiary source. Wikipedia *plus* peer-review would be gold of a purity we have never seen before....)

Can I find reliable source for those claims? Short of that, can I find attributable opinion, which is clumsier but which *can* be used. The claim about strategy vulnerability of Approval is actually an opinion, not a fact, and it should be attributed. I'll fix it. (Mr. Cary was correct to insist that the claim based on Nagel et al stay in the article, less correct to remove the weasel word that made it true without contest, but, in the end, the correct response is what he suggested: balance it.

It's nice to see some actual work on the article taking place. It's been insufficient and stagnant for quite a while. --Abd (talk) 23:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Abd: I'm checking where we have some agreement. I'd agree to the following, would you? As long as we are talking about range voting where the winner is the candidate with the most total points, as opposed to some version of average points range voting, approval voting is equivalent, at least in some formal sense and in a sense of tallying the votes, to any two-valued range voting system, whether the values are, for example, 0 and 1, or 0 and 10, or -1 and +1. Also, that any of the varieties of approval voting are equivalent to each other, again at least in some formal sense and in a sense of tallying the votes, as long as there are exactly two ways for the voter to express the vote, independently for each candidate, and the winner is the candidate with the most "affirmative" votes, regardless of whether the two ways for the voter to express themselves are, for example, vote for and don't vote for (abstain from voting for that candidate), vote for and vote against, vote yes and vote no, vote approval and don't vote (abstain from voting for that candidate), or vote approval and vote disapproval. On the other hand, approval voting is not equivalent, not even in some formal sense nor in a sense of tallying the votes, to a voting system that allows each voter to express a vote in more than two ways, independently for each candidate. For example, if the voter is allowed to vote independently for each candidate with a 0,1,or 2, with a -1, 0, or +1, or with a 0, 1, 2, or 3, and the winner is the candidate with the most total points, that would not be equivalent to any approval voting system. (I apologize for the long, complicated sentences. I'm not trying to be tricky with phrasing. Any agreement is subject to revision if a rabbit gets pulled out the hat later on.) DCary (talk) 09:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Short answer: Yes, written after I wrote what is below, which explores it. The only quibble: it is not the number of different ways a voter may vote, exactly, but the number of different ways that the system, for purposes of determining a winner, counts the votes. I give below an example of an Approval system where the voter may vote in three ways, Favorite, Accepted, and (no vote), Favorite is counted the same as Approved, the Favorite vote is used for other purposes. If the Favorite vote is used in any way to determine the outcome, it is no longer clearly an Approval method. Now, to the exploration:

I *generally* agree, and, to match Mr. Cary's concern for precision, I will look for the possible exceptions, none of which should detract from the general agreement. Mr. Cary has objected to my lack of brevity; however, the primary cause is writing without having a fixed conclusion in mind. When I have a fixed conclusion, I can be brief like everyone else. I think this should be understood, or else I wouldn't bother saying it: brevity is commonly a product of a POV. (But people with a POV may also lack brevity, that's another story. Sometimes, rarely, NPOV is also concise. Notice how many times making the text of an article NPOV requires adding text to it. The POV version was brief, and then editors with the POV will complain that the addition is "too much," "unnecessarily detailed," "nitpicky," etc.)

The promoters of Range voting initially proposed, in fact, sum-of-votes, and Cardinal ratings is sum-of-votes. Whether or not to promote average Range was heavily debated, and the only reason, in my opinion, that the Center for Range Voting promotes average range is that the primary founder, Warren Smith, has an opinion about it. The other cofounder doesn't actually support that opinion, but isn't forceful about it. Most writers about Range simply assume sum-of-votes, or, more accurately, assume that sum-of-votes and average Range are the same. The simulations done with Range assume, in fact, that it is the same as Approval with fractional votes, and they assume no abstentions on individual candidates. (That is, when the simulations consider so-called strategic voting, they assume that voters give a minimum rating to undesired candidates, typically all of them, even if they actually have preferences among them that might otherwise be significant.

Bottom line: When we say that Approval is equivalent to Range, we mean that Approval is a Range method, that the Approval rules correspond to a specific Range implementation, which would be, yes, sum of votes, and an assumption of zero rating if the voter does not vote for the candidate (which is what sum of votes does. Specifically, Approval is Range 1, where the 1 refers to the preference strength expressable, it is equivalent to the number of ratings minus 1. If blanks are considered midrange, this is actually an additional vote option, thus it is Range 3. (If Nos are subtracted from Yes, as ArbComm does, there are then three expressable votes, each with a different effect, so it is no longer Approval.)

What is critical is the number of vote options that actually affect the result in distinct ways. A method has been proposed which I called A+. It is simply approval voting with an additional position which voters can mark, called "Preferred." A preferred vote is counted the same as an ordinary vote, for the purposes of determining the winner, hence A+, even though there is an additional option on the ballot, is identical to Approval in behavior *for the purposes of determining the winner.* It is an Approval method. The additional mark is used (1) for public campaign finance, (2) for assigning future ballot position to parties, perhaps, (3) to satisfy the desire of voters to be able to indicate their favorite, and (4) to measure election performance, since this can detect a possible Majority criterion failure in the event of more than one candidate gaining a majority. There is, then, another method, which is *not* pure Approval, but which is, in fact, a form of top-two runoff Approval, with the additional requirement that multiple majorities also trigger a runoff. Or, alternatively, if there is more than one majority, the preference markers prevail. This is moot here, it is only background to explain why, for the purpose of classifying and comparing methods, it is the number of distinct expressable votes for each candidate -- instead of marks on the ballot -- which determine the variety of method. Approval, like Plurality, has two.

Concise way of saying this, that actually covers it all: "Approval is a form of Range Voting." the use of the indefinite article implies that there are other forms of Range that are not Approval, but that all Approval methods are also Range methods. It follows from the definitions. And I can adduce, if necessary, many sources for this. But I won't do that work unless it is necessary, and I don't consider it necessary. In the Range article, I think that there is a corresponding statement, something like "Range voting, when the number of ratings used is two, reduces to Approval voting." --Abd (talk) 16:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Your clarification about the way multiple voting options are tallied is on target. That was a loose end that for the sake of preciseness needed to be addressed. DCary (talk) 23:47, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So two more points, the first, I think is another point of agreement. Given the equivalency of methods for tallying approval votes, the way in which voting is presented to the voter can influence how the voter votes. It can make a difference whether the ballot instructions simply tell the voter to vote for as many candidates as the voter chooses, or whether the ballot instructions tell the voter to vote for the candidates that the voter approves of. It makes a difference whether the voter is asked to vote 0 or 1, or whether to vote -1 or +1. There won't be differences for all voters. There may be differences for only a few out of a large group, but in a large group, say 1,000 people, we would expect there will be differences. The cause may be lack of mathematical literacy, perceived nuances in meaning, or other psychological influences that the voter is not aware of.

The second point is not necessarily a point of agreement, but my attempt to confirm my understanding of what you have presented. In the context of the Procedures section, the terms 'approve' and 'disapprove' are equivalent in meaning to 'vote for' and 'not vote for'. (Please ignore for the moment that, as used in that section, the terms should perhaps not be quoted.)

Do you agree with the first point and am I on target with the second? DCary (talk) 23:47, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes as to the first point, first. The ballot instructions could affect how voters vote. While, certainly, a jurisdiction could decide to give any instructions it chooses (How about "Vote for your favorite Democrat. Other votes will be foolish) but such instructions might well be seen as attempts to improperly influence how people vote, and they could indeed be so. I'll give an example. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a referendum implemented preferential voting for Mayor. Apparently, voting was along partisan lines, Democrats for, Republicans against. Why? Well, the Republicans were accustomed to winning the mayoral election because the Democrats and the Human Rights Party would split the vote. The result was a mayoral election won by the Democrat, sometimes claimed to be the "first black mayor." The Republicans then promoted an initiative to rescind it, which passed. Now, suppose a similar jurisdiction were to implement Approval voting. Perhaps the Republicans aren't able to get rid of approval, but they can, perhaps, control the ballot instructions. "Vote for all candidate you approve of" could cause a shift toward some of the HRP supporters not voting for the Democrat, thus shifting the election toward the Republican. Current ballot instructions do not tell voters how to vote. They do not say "vote for your favorite," nor do they say, "vote for your preferred candidate among those whom you think has a chance to win" -- which is what most voters actually do. Comes Approval, the situation is the same, and, indeed, the likely sensible voting pattern is the same, only with, now, an additional freedom. You can add other votes if it serves you. These votes are all "approvals" but only in the active sense, i.e., as an agency approves a permit or a government approves a visa. They are actions which give enabling weight to the candidate. They are not sentiments.

As to the second, again, yes. "Vote for" and "don't vote for" are equivalent, in analysis of Approval voting, to "approve" and "disapprove;" however, in consideration of the psychology of voting, there might be some difference. "Approve" is sufficiently undefined, however, when we try to use it in the psychological sense -- as distinct from the active sense -- that it is practically useless, to use it one would have to come up with some very specific definition for it. Perhaps "would be pleased to see this candidate elected"? That, however, is not a quality of the candidate, because what we are pleased with depends on context. We are "pleased" compared to something. If a stock corporation issues a dividend, whether the shareholders are pleased or not depends on what they were expecting. Whether or not a candidate will be "approved" depends on the alternatives, including expectations of what is possible. I might prefer Al Gore for President, but ... if he is not on the ballot, do I write him in? What if there is a Ranked Choice election, like in San Francisco? Do I use up a rank to cast a write-in vote for Al Gore? With Approval, actually, it's easy. I can write in anyone I like, subject to the space provided on the ballot, and it is *harmless* at worst. At best, what if everyone else was thinking the same way?

--Abd (talk) 04:41, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback and confirmations. DCary (talk) 08:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Here are my assessments of where we stand, building on the agreements we appear to have and taking note of some of the differences. "Approve" can indeed mean either to have a kind of thought, a favorable opinion or to express something, to take a kind of action. Regarding the first claimed equivalency, as a first case, if "approve" refers to having the thought, then consistent with our second point of agreement, there is not a full, unrestricted equivalency. There are situations where the two descriptions are not interchangeable in meaning or effect. The lack of equivalency is not necessarily a statement about approval voting as a voting system, per se, depending on where you draw the boundaries for the system in a system/user dichotomy. The claimed equivalency is about how voters vote.

If on the other hand, "approve" means the action, then there are two possibilities. As I read several dictionaries and their definitions (Merriam-Webster definitions) for "approve", they do not divorce the action from the favorable opinion as Abd does. As a second case, consider that "approve" referring to an action means to express a favorable opinion. Then this is really the same case as the first case, and there is no full, unrestricted equivalency. If instead, as a third case, we accept Abd's distinction and interpret "approve" and "disapprove" to mean in this context "vote for" and "not vote for" respectively, then the first equivalency (inappropriate quotation of terms removed):

"Each voter may vote for as many options as wanted, at most once per option. This is equivalent to saying that each voter may approve or disapprove each option by voting or not voting for it ..."

really just means:

"Each voter may vote for as many options as wanted, at most once per option. This is equivalent to saying that each voter may vote for or not vote for each option by voting or not voting for it ..."

which is really only a very badly garbled construct. With a stretch it might be construed in a meaningful way, but the easiest way to construe it is as something that is clearly false.

Now with the first claim of equivalency being false or garbled nonsense, what is being said in the second claim of equivalency? What exactly does "it's" refer to? Certainly not approval voting, which hasn't yet been mentioned in the section. The second claimed equivalency is not a claimed equivalency between two voting systems. "It's" reasonably has to refer to one of the parts of the first equivalency. Regardless of which part "it's" refers to, the second equivalency is also about voters voting. So again, as in the first case, based on our second point of agreement, the second equivalency is not a full, unrestricted equivalency. DCary (talk) 08:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So what do we do? While we have reliable sources for describing approval voting procedures, no sources have been provided for the claimed equivalencies. So it is difficult to justify a particular way of trying to rehabilitate them.

I recommend that we drop the claims of equivalencies from this section and stick to language describing approval voting procedures that closely reflect our reliable sources, Brams and Fishburn, 1983, for example. That description mentions voting as approving and just voting for candidates, leaving the relationship between the two unspecified/ambiguous, but certainly not asserting an equivalency. This approach will also have the significant added benefits of simplifying the procedure description and making it more understandable to readers with a limited background on the subject. I'll even suggest that the whole description be moved to the first introductory paragraph, perhaps leaving the first section, retitled, to the remaining example.

The relationship of approval voting to range voting is already mentioned in the introduction. There could be some value to giving a more complete description of that elsewhere in the article, sourced eventually perhaps by the book Abd mentions. There is already an "Other issues and comparisons" section where a more complete description might readily fit.

The whole user interface influence/effects issue is something that is worth discussing in the article, but only after the we have reliable sources for the material. The current section on ballot types is related material tha is emblematic of the problems with unsourced content. DCary (talk) 08:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My concern about a recent series of edits ([15]) ([16]) ([17]) on the introduction focuses on what is now the second sentence and how "approve" is used in relation to voting for a candidate. As described earlier in this Talk: subsection, "approve" can be understood with more than one meaning. The different meanings can reflect different points of view about what an approval vote may or may not mean. As a result, using "approve" can be ambiguous and removing ambiguity can have the effect of stressing one POV at the expense of another. Similarly, "or" can have an inclusive or an exclusive connotation, it may or may not signify an alternative. The current language tends to emphasize an interpretation that "voting for" a candidate is equivalent to or is a (technical) definition of "approving of" a candidate. The recommendation of the previous comment, which received no objection, was to use language that closely reflected the language in a reliable source. On the use of "approve", the language before this change ([18]) more closely reflected the cited source than the language after the change. The current version is closer than some of the intermediate changes. Some explanation and justification for the change would have been helpful, especially given the recent discussion that preceded the change. DCary (talk) 04:15, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I will also note here the singular/plural grammatical mismatch of "Each voter may ... as they wish.", although it is not a NPOV concern. DCary (talk) 04:15, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The "Historical use" section opens with an unsourced claim that approval voting has been used in deciding (presumably in Nevada) conflicting ballot questions because voting on conflicting ballot questions is equivalent to approval voting with a majority required to win. I tagged this with a fact tag both because it was not supported by a source and because I seriously doubted its veracity. At the time I left a discussion note indicating that claims of equivalency needed to be supported. Within a few days, Abd deleted the tag, claiming in the edit summary that the equivalence was obvious diff. However, I don't know what such an equivalence is, let alone how to prove it. It certainly isn't obvious to me. So as indicated earlier, I'm following up on this issue and inviting Abd to provide a reliable source for the claim and/or, as best he can, 1) identify and prove the equivalence and 2) show that equivalence and its proof is obvious. DCary (talk) 04:13, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The claim that multiple ballot question process is a the same process as Approval voting is, again, based on definitions. This actually has not been widely noticed, I'm not sure why. Remember, what we had was the claim that Approval voting is not used for public elections, so this is a counterexample. It's been mentioned in quite a few very public places, places where erroneous arguments can meet a firestorm of objections, but none of them, to my knowledge, meeting RS. However, it has also never been challenged in those places, that is, I have seen no argument at all contrary to what this article says: the process for choosing among multiple conflicting ballot options is equivalent to the process for choosing among multiple conflicting candidate options in an Approval system with majority Yes vote required for election.

Now, having written what is below, I'll now say that everyone may have overlooked a detail.

The reference provided with the claim is to Nevada law. There are other states with the same provision, I think it is common for states that allow initiative by petition. I just edited the text to, hopefully, make this clearer, this is what it is now:

To resolve multiple conflicting Ballot Questions, where the vote is Yes or No on each, and some voters abstain on some Questions, some jurisdictions provide that, if more than one question gains a majority, the question receiving the most Yes votes prevails over the other,^[3] which is the equivalent of approval voting with a minimum majority required to win.

Here is why this is important: it is claimed that Approval does not satisfy the majority criterion, which is debatable, it depends on definitions (as we have seen above, on the definition of "sincere vote"). That's really semantics, but underneath it is a political claim that some (such as FairVote make explicitly, Approval voting allegedly does not satisfy "majority rule." (We ought to have that in the article by the way, we need better presentation of the controversy over Approval, the efforts of Steven Brams, etc. It's notable.) The case presented is precisely the one that these Ballot Question rules deal with, i.e., two candidates both gain a majority. In that case, it is possible that one, the one with a lower Yes vote (or just plain lower vote, which amounts to the same thing *except* for the satisfaction of a majority issue), was preferred by a majority over the other. So if "majority rule" is violated by Approval, it is violated already, in the multiple ballot question issue.

Now, thinking this over, I re-examined the question of this "majority requirement," and I may have incorrectly -- still -- presented the situation. I need to examine this rigorously.

These are the possible situations. This can be analyzed with more than two initiatives, but, for simplicity, I'm sticking to two. if VY(1) is the Yes for for the first initiative and VN(1) is the No vote, and we have the like of this with the second initiative, we have the following conditions:

VY(1) > VN(1) alone, 1 would pass. OR

VY(1) <= VN(1) 1 fails.

VY(2) > VN(2) alone, 2 would pass. OR

VY(2) <= VN(2) 2 fails.

so, overall, there are the following possibilities.

1. 1 passes, 2 fails.

2. 1 fails, 2 passes.

3. 1 and 2 fail.

4. 1 and 2 pass, 1 prevails

5. 1 and 2 pass, 2 prevails

6. 1 and 2 tie (I think this contingency is considered, but I'll neglect it)

Now, it could occur that 1 passes and 2 fails, as an example. But suppose that the Yes vote for 1 is lower than the Yes vote for 2. Under ordinary Approval (plurality, Yes/No voting) rules, 2 would prevail. This outcome would actually contradict majority rule, since a majority voted against 2. But in most implementations of Approval, in fact, the No vote is assumed, so the precondition is impossible, because an increase in the Yes vote would always represent a decrease in the No vote. Yes/No approval potentially has this problem, but it is easily avoidable: in order to win, a candidate must obtain majority approval.

This, of course, could lead to unresolved elections, just like any majority requirement. With initiatives, this is no problem, because there is no necessary desirability that any initiative at all be passed. With officer elections, it's the same as a majority requirement now; a runoff will be triggered.

In what is truly significant about the situation with initiatives, the matter of multiple majorities, this exception is moot: the precondition is that both pass. It is only with Yes/No voting that it arises. And, of course, we have opened a whole can of worms. Well, that's the way the cookie crumbles. I've been accused in the past of cherry-picking data and facts and analyses. I don't. I report what I find, and, in fact, detest the habit of too many political activists to reveal what helps their goals and conceal what does not. I place honesty above my personal goals.

The point about "majority rule" remains correct, and that is quite possibly where this information should go. It certainly is *almost* equivalent to Approval voting, and it is the same as Approval with a majority requirement to win or the candidate is disqualified from winning, which is what I meant in what is in the intro.... I'd say that *this* claim is now correct, but we have uncovered a subtle difference between Yes/No approval and Plurality ballot Approval. In practice, if Yes/No approval disregards the No votes, they are the same. But, that, of course, raises other issues.--Abd (talk) 20:07, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Do any of the public places this was mentioned without receiving objection happen to be instances of the "peer-review by mailing list" or other such thing that you have touted as a source for reliable information, even if it is not acknowledged by Wikipedia policy? If so, can you provide specifics? Where? When? Submitted by whom? DCary (talk) 21:40, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fairly clearly, the justification for the claim is not obvious. Actually the claim is erroneous. The conflicting ballot questions election is some form of 3-value voting system and can not be equivalent to approval voting. Since the claim is about a 3-value voting system, it probably does not belong in the approval voting article. Without any sources, this claim is clearly original research, apparently Abd's OR. Abd originally added the claim to the article ([19]). The recent attempts at rehabilitating the claim still left it as an erroneous and unsourced claim. As original research, and especially as erroneous original research, it does not belong in any Wikipedia articles, least of all as a Wikipedia-based exercise in self-publishing. The claim will be removed. DCary (talk) 02:28, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The "Historical use" section contains an claim about the use of Bucklin voting in the United States. The claim is started with a comparison of Bucklin voting to Instant-runoff voting. I had added a fact-tag to the claim of similarity, and Abd removed that tag (diff), justifying the claim of similarity was obvious on the following points:

• Both use a ranked preference ballot
• Both do a sequential analysis in rounds
• Both stop further rounds when a candidate has a majority of the votes

I am continuing my challenge to this part of the entry and I am expanding the challenge to include the entire comparison between Bucklin and IRV. I agree that Bucklin and IRV share the points of similarity that Abd enumerated. However, there are a number of other voting systems that share those similarities with Bucklin or that can be described in those terms. Even approval voting can be described in a way that matches those points of similarity.

So the fundamental question is: Why mention IRV and only IRV? The Bucklin voting article is subsequently referenced and a brief description of the method is also given. Then the comparison is given that is actually important to the claim, the similarities between Bucklin and approval voting. In addition, the rest of the comparison is inaccurate, especially the uses of the words "only", "approval", and "alternative".

I recommend that the comparison to IRV be removed. That comparison is not relevant, it confuses people, especially those who do not have the requisite prior knowledge, and its use at the start of the item only delays and obscures the core content of the item. Those problems could only be exacerbated by an attempt to fix the current inaccuracies in the comparison. We don't have a reliable source to provide a basis for keeping the comparison. DCary (talk) 21:18, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree and boldly removed the reference to IRV. Tom Ruen (talk) 21:54, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

An anonymous editor added some old text back to the Strategy section. I modified it to "allegedly susceptible," and we need more discussion in the article than that. Approval was designed for minimum susceptibility and, indeed, what the critics assert as "strategic voting" requires an inconsistent definition of "strategic voting" than is used with other methods.

Strategic voting with ranked methods, which is all that voting theorists used to consider, requires expressing reversed preference. That is, the voter supports A over B, when, in fact, the voter prefers B to A. The voter does this with an expectation that the outcome will improve from the voter's point of view. The most common and blatant example of this would be a voter who votes for Gore when she prefers Nader, because she knows that the Nader vote would be wasted, and Bush might win. (no political implications intended!)

Approval was designed to avoid this, and it succeeds, completely. So what is the criticism? What is the alleged vulnerability to strategic voting, what does the voter do? Well, the most common one is that a voter votes sincerely! Yes, that is exactly what is claimed, though, of course, it isn't stated that way. A voter allegedly "actually" approves A and B, but wants A to defeat B, so votes for A only. *That is a sincere vote.* The conditions establish that the voter prefers A over B (or else why would the voter vote for A), but, supposedly, approves both.

However, "approves both" is a situational decision that voters make depending on reasonable election outcomes. This is not strategic voting in the sense being claimed. (tactical voting is what Wikipedia calls it, and that is its own can of worms). It is simply voters voting to maximize their expected outcome for the election, which is what voters are *supposed* to do. The articles cited are hit pieces against Approval voting.

By establishing a new criterion, "approval," as if it were an absolute, critics make it appear that Approval is susceptible to strategic voting, i.e., "insincere voting." It is preposterous, really. --Abd (talk) 18:54, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The addition of "allegedly" is not in keeping with Wikipedia's policy on neutrality. Abd's comments above only confirm that assessment. See also Wikipedia:Words to avoid, especially "allegedly" . As a result, I have reverted the addition of "allegedly".

I agree with Abd that there is much more that can be said about strategy and about what the already referenced reliable sources have to say about it. However, where there are differing points of view, Abd is required by Wikipedia policy to neutrally present alternative points of view based on content of reliable sources. In his comments above, he only offers alternative perspectives as his own original research, which can not be the basis for article content. That is not otherwise passing judgment on the validity of the ideas Abd expresses, just applying the rules of Wikipedia. Start with reliable sources. DCary (talk) 22:25, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I present my perspective on the issues as background. I don't think you will notice me putting original research into articles, unless it is the minimal OR that is allowed, i.e., research that anyone could have done and which they would now be able to do with the sources provided. Like 2 cat in this place and 2 cats in the other place equals 4 cats in both places. A minor point is also that editors are not *required* to do anything. We are free. If we violate civility, if we edit war, if we are disruptive, we can be blocked. Failing to "neutrally present alternative points of view" is not a punishable offense. Rather, the "penalty" is that the edit might not stand. And, indeed, it should not stand, if inadequately established and properly challenged. Problem is that we know there are notable points of view that are not rooted in reliable source. It's a basic problem for Wikipedia in general, and there is still quite a bit of controversy about it. *In fact*, consensus of editors routinely trumps an absolutist interpretation of WP:RS, the *policy* is WP:V. If I'm correct, editors have been blocked for edit warring to defend a demand for "reliable source." It's worth noting that the former, RS, is only a guideline, and it has been proposed that it be merged into the verifiability policy page. However, the whole policy/guideline is in trouble, because WP:V refers to WP:RS for the definition of "reliable source." What seems to be sufficient is that the facts stated in the article are reliably verifiable, which would be the obvious interpretation of "verifiability" and the insistence that it be a published source is weaker.

While starting with reliable sources is nice, it can be highly inefficient. In my view, the best articles are written *as a start* by people who know the subject well and who also understand WP:NPOV and are careful about it; this will often be sparsely sourced. It takes a lot of time to properly source text, far, far less than to simply write it. Articles that get written directly from reliable source often simply copy it, or paraphrase. And, of course, "reliable sources" often have their POV, as I mention above, there is reliable source and there is reliable source. Later, others come along and source it. Meanwhile, this is distracting me from actually finding sources for what's well-known in the field.

--Abd (talk) 01:33, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

One more point. "Allegedly" can be used in summary style. What I did, inserting that word, was to consider that there is a controversy here, and only one side is in the article, and, in fact, the other side is more notable. In any case, the fix is to edit the section, the weasel word was only intended as a stopgap. It will be clear when I'm done, I believe, that this was an notable allegation, not a fact. --Abd (talk) 01:36, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Approval voting can also be used for voting or polling questions which allow a variable number of winners. A clear example is the question of candidate inclusion for debates. An approval poll would be better to ask: "Which candidates do you want to see in the debate?" rather than the usual polling question: "Who would you vote for if the election was today?"

In such a poll, a fixed threshold for inclusion could be made. For example, a debate could include all candidates above 15% approval support. Special rules would be needed to guarantee at least 2 candidates passing, possibly simply including all of the candidates.

The advantage of approval polling is that voters have no fear that "overvoting" will hurt their higher choices. Undecided voters will tend to want to hear from more candidates early in the campaign, and will tend to reduce their preferences as voting day approaches.

I remove this unreferenced section above. It might be called approval polling, but it isn't approval voting in the sense of this article's subject, rather represents actually N independent polls for N candidates. Tom Ruen (talk) 03:56, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I removed this from the introduction. I cannot verify the claim from the sources. I have read the Nagel article, and I don't recall seeing a mention of "approval is vulnerable to strategic voting," and the other article is clearly argumentative, just look at the title. It is one side of a debate, and practically incivil in it at that. This is what I took out:

Approval voting is susceptible to strategic voting.

<ref>Niemi, R.G. (1984) [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0554%28198412%2978%3A4%3C952%3ATPOSBU%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D "The Problem of Strategic Behavior under Approval Voting"] ''American Political Science Review'' '''78'''(4) pp. 952-958</ref>

<ref>Saari, D.G. and Van Newenhizen, J. (2004)[http://www.springerlink.com/content/qnw1x486u887t2l5/ "Is approval voting an ‘unmitigated evil?’ A response to Brams, Fishburn, and Merrill"] ''Public Choice'' '''59'''(2) pp. 133-147</ref>

If someone can quote exact text from these articles showing the claim that "Approval voting is vulnerable to strategic voting, as it is defined in the Wikipedia article -- which is what we are saying when we link to that -- then I'd have to change my position. Nagel discusses a problem he sees with Approval, a problem which I think is 99% fantasy (it didn't happen with Burr, it is his imagination that it *might* have happened), but that problem isn't "strategic voting." As to Saari, anyone got access to the text? Did I ask this before? The necessary claim isn't in the abstract. More to come. --Abd (talk) 01:54, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(I'm going to have a problem, Nagel does say that, I think, but ... the devil is in the details) --Abd (talk)

Okay, from the Wikipedia article on Tactical voting, which is what the text actually pointed to: "In voting systems, tactical voting (or strategic voting or sophisticated voting) occurs when a voter supports a candidate other than his or her sincere preference in order to prevent an undesirable outcome." In the Burr dilemma, the problem is voters voting for their sincere preference! What *exactly* do they claim? You can't just summarize it as "strategic voting" without a definition of strategic voting and without the article actually saying so -- or matching the definition precisely. --Abd (talk) 02:00, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, what is "tactical voting" or "strategic voting"? We have the Wikipedia definition above; it isn't really kosher as a source, of course. (but if it is incorrect, and we link to it, using the same name, we have a problem and we should really address an incorrect definition.) So I'm asking de novo: what can we find?

[http://www.crest.ox.ac.uk/papers/p94.pdf Extending the Rational Voter Theory of Tactical Voting, Stephen Fisher] "when voters decide it is optimal to abandon their first preference party and vote for another it is said that they voted tactically (or strategically)."

Nagel, it turns out, does discuss "strategic voting." I'm reading it over again, he goes on and on, it's frustrating reading.... so I'll be back with that in more detail. --Abd (talk) 02:18, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I do not find a place where Nagel defines what he means by "strategic voting." He makes a statement: "The mere fact that approval voting runs into a problem with strategic behavior is not sufficient to reject it. We know from the Gibbard-Sattherthwaite theorem that, when there are three or more choices, all voting procedures are vulnerable–not always, but under some configurations of preferences--to manipulation by strategic voting (Gibbard 1973)."

Now, reading over what was previous to this, the "problem" Nagel refers to is not a problem of the method, per se, but a "problem" that the voter faces: shall the voter approve a candidate other than the favorite? If so, the voter risks the favorite losing to that candidate; if not, the voter risks that both the favorite and the other candidate lose to a third. This is what the article properly describes as "strategic voting" in Approval, i.e., strategy of voting. Here is where Nagel slips in the shift in definition. Voting for a second is not "abandoning" the first preference. Or is it? We will need to examine this.

Most hits I find on "tactical voting" and "strategic voting" are referring to the practice with Plurality. This involves preference reversal. Much of the problem with this issue is that "strategic voting" and "sincere voting" get all tangled up. Some claim that to add a second approval is insincere voting if the voter has any preference at all between the first and second. Other claim that only preference reversal is insincere. And, in many months of going over this topic, I've found no way to clearly resolve it. It is definitions of words, and people extended the definitions without being explicit that they were doing so. James Armytage-Green, at least, was quite aware of the problem, and attempted to address it. In order to examine the Majority Criterion performance of methods, he had to assume that the votes were sincere. What is a sincere vote in Approval? There really is no definition, other than you vote for your favorite and you don't vote for the worst candidate. What you do with candidates in between is what? Sincere? Insincere? *There is no way to avoid failing to fully express preference when there are three or more candidates, because Approval allows only two ranks or ratings. So the voter must equal rank at the top or at the bottom, and, either way, does not express a preference. So are all Approval votes in such elections insincere? Seems preposterous? Does to me, too. I think I just defined a sincere vote in Approval, quite well, just above. Top vote and bottom vote. The rest is optional.

So what is "strategic voting" in this situation? I think Brams got it right. Approval is designed to provide no incentive for "strategic voting," which was intended to mean "insincere voting."

In any case, if we are going to have a *refutation* of Brams in the article, we certainly should have Brams original claims with it. Otherwise it introduces severe imbalance. Indeed, why doesn't the article give the history of Brams introduction of Approval? It's well-known, and it should be there. Approval was *designed* to be strategy-proof, in the sense that strategy was understood. Brams has written a history. When we have this, from Brams, in the article, it will then be important to introduce criticism paired with it.

Well, this is more than I can complete tonight.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Abd (talk • contribs) 02:55, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Once again, Abd has taken action that is not in keeping with the Wikipedia:Neutrality policy. As before, the comments Abd makes to justify his action only serve mostly to confirm the problems with his actions. First, disagreeing with or not liking a sourced statement is not reason to delete it. Second, it would have been more appropriate for Abd to (re)read the referenced source before finding fault with the source or the statement in the article; doing so would have avoided premature and ill-founded claims about the source and its representation in the article. It certainly is not appropriate for Abd to delete the statement from the article while he thrashes about, spending time educating himself on the issues. As Abd points out, this is not new material for this article. As a result of all this, I have reverted his deletion.

This reversion is not a judgment on my part on the specifics of how the article ultimately should deal with this issue. However, I do have an expectation that where there are different, even (seemingly) conflicting opinions or approaches in various reliable sources, that variety should likely be neutrally presented, not one to the exclusion of others. DCary (talk) 05:10, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'll point out a distinction between an action "not in keeping with ... neutrality policy," and text that does not conform. NPOV text is *commonly* found through a series of edits that are each, arguably, POV; as such, given sufficient editor participation and common assumptions of good faith, eventually the text settles as NPOV *in the judgement of the participating editors.* NPOV is actually not a characteristic of text, it's a judgement by those participating. Absolutely, a disagreement with a statement is not a reason for it to *ultimately* be excluded. However, exclusion *can* be part of the process of getting to NPOV. It will then be brought back by another editor, hopefully modified to reflect the POV or possibly neutral intention, perhaps poorly realized, in the explanation of the removal. This has actually been done, now, and if I had not removed the text, it might not have become balanced as it is. In other words, I'll claim some measure of success resulting from my removal of what was, in fact, a POV claim. That a claim is in a source, or even in a series of sources, does not make it a fact, particularly when the sources acknowledge the controversy! I'll get to this below. The text had, as a fact, "Approval voting is vulnerable to strategic voting." It's not a fact, it is an argument, and it uses loaded language: "vulnerable," which implies harm, and "strategic voting," which is, as I've shown, unclearly defined. "Strategic behavior" actually has some of the same problematic implications, *but*, expressed as it now is, it is certainly far closer to NPOV than it was, and I just might leave it there. Progress, not Perfection. --Abd (talk) 16:36, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I found an opposing peer-reviewed source which, in it's introduction, specifically refers to the other two sources in contention here. Clearly WP:NPOV demands both sides be presented. MilesAgain (talk) 05:16, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I found three more on the con side, and no more on the pro side, all from the same google search (["approval voting" strategy]) -- I am sure there are more on both sides. MilesAgain (talk) 05:51, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Feel free to share at least the references to the sources you are finding. Btw, as you describe it, which side is pro and which is con, and to what? 71.139.15.101 (talk) 08:19, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

diff MilesAgain (talk) 08:21, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(unindent)MilesAgain is a POV editor, an acknowledged sock, but he is also quite commonly a useful editor (and his behavior has generally stopped short of what would cause consequences from being a sock). He is pro-IRV, which commonly translates to anti-everything-else. Thus he frames what apparently an effort by a number of editors, to find neutral text, as a POV conflict, and edits are going to be seen as supporting Approval (Pro) or as criticizing it (Con). He is correct, above, however, in noting that we should ensure that "both sides be presented." The framing of this as having only two sides is characteristic of POV, by the way. But it does, in fact, fairly represent this issue: claims of vulnerability to strategic behavior are commonly associated with support for IRV. But not always. In any case, the Niemi citation is particularly interesting. The original claim in the article had Niemi and Nagel as sources. Nagel is explicitly promoting IRV, and is the one who uses "strategic voting" in his language, in the Burr Dilemma article -- which is essentially a mass of speculation, published in a peer-reviewed journal. Niemi, however, seems to be much more neutral and careful in his examination, though his conclusions are certainly debatable. I think it is worth quoting the abstract here.[20]

Approval voting is being promoted as "the election reform of the 20th century" (Brams, 1980, p. 105), and indeed if voters' preferences are dichotomous, approval voting has some remarkable qualities: it is uniquely strategy-proof, a candidate wins if and only if he is a Condorcet winner, and voters have simple strategies that are at once sincere and sophisticated. However, all of these results depend on the existence of dichotomous preferences, a contrived and empirically unlikely assumption. Here I show that these virtues of approval voting are replaced by some rather undersirable features under more plausible assumptions. More fundamentally, rather than promoting "honest" behavior, as is sometimes implied, the existence of multiple sincere strategies almost begs voters to behave strategically. I also examine sophisticated approval voting and show that in the general case it need not pick a Condorcet alternative. Ironically, there is a condition under which Condorcet winners may always be picked, but for this to occur, voters sometimes have to vote for candidates of whom they disapprove.

First of all, this does not state "Approval voting is vulnerable to strategic voting." The article might, I haven't seen the article yet, except for some interesting pieces that are on the page visible on JSTOR.[21]

Rather, Niemi talks about "strategic behavior." Is Approval voting vulnerable to "strategic behavior"? Who would put it that way? The article describes strategic voting under Approval, and the description was not controversial. Approval advocates describe Approval voting strategy. But is the optimal strategic behavior "strategic voting," or "tactical voting"? This is presumably undesirable, but that is quite debatable, because "strategic" or "tactical voting" -- strategic optimization -- under Approval does not involve preference reversal, unlike the case with ranked methods such as IRV. So what does Niemi actually say? Above, we see that he acknowledges a central claim of approval advocates: "if voters' preferences are dichotomous, approval voting has some remarkable qualities: it is uniquely strategy-proof, a candidate wins if and only if he is a Condorcet winner, and voters have simple strategies that are at once sincere and sophisticated."

"Sophisticated" is a stretch in a dichotomous situation. The sophistication arrives in *determining* the dichotomy. In any case, Niemi is here acknowledging that an equal vote in the presence of a preference is sincere. "Tactical voting" implies insincerity, and it and the equivalent term, "strategic voting," excepting rare contentious references to Approval voting, are *always* used to indicate insincere voting, as I found in my searches underneath what I wrote above. I did not, in fact, *find* any references to Approval in those searches unless I included the term in my search (they would be there, but buried in massive numbers of other hits; almost all hits are about Plurality elections). So if he later calls the strategic behavior he is going to examine, "strategic voting," he will be, to some degree, contradicting himself. I'm going to suspect that he used the word "behavior" here because he understood the implications.

Niemi goes on, "However, all of these results depend on the existence of dichotomous preferences, a contrived and empirically unlikely assumption." Now, there is a standard dichotomous preference that is what is commonly, practically universally, described as optimal Approval strategy, it is simple, and it is very effective. In practically every partisan election in the U.S., and in most nonpartisan ones, this simple strategy would work; it results in dichotomous preferences, and it is likely, I'd suggest, that most voters would understand and use it. For most voters, in a two-party or two-front-runner situation, *by definition*, this strategy would suggest bullet voting. So I don't understand why Niemi considers this "empirically unlikely." Perhaps he explains this elsewhere in the article. The strategy, of course, is (1) vote for the favorite front-runner. This is, in nearly all plurality elections actually taking place, already the most common voter behavior. (2) Then, vote for any candidate you prefer to the favored front-runner. That's it. As Niemi says, simple. Sophisticated? Well, the whole point of considering Approval strategy-proof is that this is actually the optimal strategy in the situation where there are only two front-runners, no more consideration is required. You can't do better by being clever or "sophisticated." The *only* exception is when there are three or more front-runners, which is actually, even with nonpartisan elections, quite rare. Then strategy becomes more complex, though, in fact, the simple strategy still works quite well: make your best guess as to whom the top two will be, then follow the simple strategy. *However*, to be even more effective, the voter must start to consider preference strength and odds.

But none of this involves "insincere voting." Thus using the term "strategic voting" is problematic. Niemi then calls the strategic behavior, "rather undesirable." And, he continues, "More fundamentally, rather than promoting "honest" behavior, as is sometimes implied, the existence of multiple sincere strategies almost begs voters to behave strategically."

There is, it seems to me, a strange confusion here. Approval voting allows voters to simply vote for their favorite, the simplest possible strategy. If every voter does this, Approval reduces to Plurality, which is often considered a criticism of Approval. I and others claim, though, that *if we are comparing Approval with Plurality* -- which is almost always the actual comparison being made, with the exception of comparisons, sometimes, with IRV -- this is no criticism at all. It's saying that if the features of Approval aren't used, the "failure" is the status quo, and, since there was no cost involved, simply a minor shift in rules, requiring no reprogramming of voting machines (all must already be able to handle multiple votes or Yes/No votes), and voter education is quite simple, and voter effort is minimal under most conditions, this isn't a harm, it is a lack of benefit. But that behavior, all bullet voting, in most election situations with more than three candidates, is actually extraordinarily unlikely.

In the three candidate situation, Approval allows voters to behave strategically, that is, to vote for a candidate whom they do not, in some sense, "approve of." It is only by categorizing votes as approvals -- i.e., as sentiments about the candidates-- that we can claim that the vote is insincere. And Niemi notes that this came up in the review of his article, in a note on the page I can see on JSTOR.

"As an anonymous referee pointed out, one useful perspective is to ignore any implications of the word approval and simply to think of the multiple votes as simply one way of aggregating preferences. Then my results can be viewed in part as an application of the Gibbard (1973) and Satterthwaite (1975) theorem showing that all such voting schemes are manipulable. If one does lend credence to the notion of approval, then it is worth pointing out some of the consequences of that view."

This is the crux of it. The referee pointed out what I've pointed out many times, though I may place emphasis differently. I argue that votes are votes, they are *decisions*, not sentiments, though sentiment is involved in how voters make their decisions. It is possible, indeed common, to think of Approval voting as involving "approval" of candidates, but there is a semantic ambiguity there. Niemi takes "approve," it appears from what he wrote, to refer to an absolute sentiment, i.e, a quality of candidates, divorced from context, which the voter then expresses in a sincere vote. It is *this*, in fact, that is divorced from reality. Voters rarely vote their fully sincere preferences, period. Take any plurality election that allows write-ins. For a voter to vote sincerely by the absolute preference standard, the voter *must* write in the number one person among all eligible persons -- or even among all persons, period, depending on how strict we want to make the rules for sincere vote. In plurality elections with write-ins, in fact, the election is totally open -- in theory. (Typically, in top-two runoff, write-ins are still allowed, so, if voters really do prefer another candidate not included in the top two, they could -- and perhaps should, if they think they are in the majority or close -- write in the name of their favorite, and they could, in fact, thus frustrate the runoff and maybe even win it. From this perspective, in fact, most voting methods are Condorcet-compliant *if* voters are aware of their position and vote it. Indeed, this is why direct democracies, using parliamentary process, don't need advanced voting methods. Advanced methods are needed for uninformed electorates, voting by secret ballot election without good information about the real context.)

Niemi, considering "approval" to be an absolute sentiment, then, is concerned about "strategy." This definition allows him to think of a decision of the voter to divide the candidates into dichotomous preferences, i.e., an "approved" set and a "not approved set," to be "strategic behavior" -- he is correct in any case, -- and for it to be a "problem." But *nobody* on the other side, i.e., claiming Approval to be "strategy-free" pretends that the voter should "approve" -- in the absolute sentiment sense -- of all "approved" candidates. Rather, in fact, as Approval was proposed, "approve," for these, means an act of voting for, a decision to support, which may even involve clothespins on the nose. That is, if the voter has a large preference for C, but A and B are the frontrunners, the voter, in Approval, can vote for C and A. Think of a runoff election from this, if multiple votes are allowed. Suddenly, C actually has a chance! All it takes is for the voters who actually prefer C to write in the name and vote for C. The voters do *not* need to vote tactically, they simply vote for both A (the preferred "frontrunner") and C, whom they write in. Or, depending on their perception of the realities, just for C. Without Approval, they must take quite a chance! And if the voters are not sufficiently exercised to write in the name of C, we might infer that they don't have a significant preference. As is characteristic of Range methods, preference strength matters!

Niemi delivered his paper as a speech, originally, so the original paper may be available, that sometimes happens. I'll look for it. Bottom line, from the abstract, Niemi is *not* a source for a claim that Approval is "vulnerable to strategic voting," that is an interpretation, and one which Niemi may very well be avoiding, and, as well, may depend on a variant meaning for "strategic voting," if he does make the claim. Not all "strategic behavior" is "strategic voting."

This is currently moot (thanks to MilesAgain's thoughtful edit) except as background for further edits, and particularly the "sincerity" section which has been created since I started to write this. --Abd (talk) 21:06, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

MilesAgain is apparently not just a sock, but a super sock. Who/what else could have taken a claim that a large electorate of rational voters will vote sincerely using Instant-runoff voting, add it to this article, and have Abd not just praise him for his accomplishments, but praise him in the name of NPOV? And for the record, I'm not trying to be a trouble maker by pointing this out.  ;) DCary (talk) 04:34, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, definitely reinforced with nylon, polyester, or something, knowledgeable about the political spin of the situation, as I've seen with the Instant-runoff voting article. However, that's his privilege, and, as long as he remains civil and doesn't edit war, I'm not complaining. I just name it from time to time. The "claim" isn't in his edit here, unless I missed something, it is found in Nagel, which is truly a sorry article, I will someday, somewhere, deconstruct it in detail. However, I'm confining myself, here, to what bears on actual edits. Niemi may be another story. I'm still looking for a copy of his paper. I now have Nagel and Saari. Saari is interesting. --Abd (talk) 03:04, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have added a "Sincere Vote" section to the article because the terminology had been introduced in the strategy section. I've initially populated the section with material from Brams and Fishburn. I think that gives decent explanation for how the term is used in the strategy section. As we find reliable sources for alternative definitions or for commentary and critiques of the Brams-Fishburn definition, those could be added.

For the sake of clarity, I glossed over two features in Brams and Fishburn. First, they use the term "strategy" to mean approval vote. Second, they do not define a sincere vote for a voter who is indifferent to all candidates. The latter feature, I suspect, is mostly to simplify the statement of some of their theorems. DCary (talk) 19:28, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The section title and placement seems wrong to me. Since it pertains to the Strategy section, I wonder if it should be there, entitled "Definition of strategic approval voting" or similar. MilesAgain (talk) 19:40, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, underneath a whole series of problems in Voting systems articles is the definition of "sincere voting." It crops up with the definition of the Majority criterion. Just the other day, I reread an extended discussion, mostly between myself and Terrill Bouricius, about the definition of the Majority criterion, on the mailing list EMIG-Wikipedia@yahoogroups.com (which is a subcommittee of the Election Methods Interest Group),[22] and it revolves about the definition of "sincere vote." With ranked methods it is simple: it is a vote for any candidate that does not reverse preference. How then to consider Approval? Basically, the early uses of "Majority" as a criterion don't even consider the question. Frequently, the Majority criterion is stated in such a way as to be unspecific about whether the "ranking" involved is actually expressed on the ballot. No method can consider unexpressed preferences! If the Majority criterion is about expressed votes, no problem. *Approval passes.* (And there is a contingent that think this way). If it is about voter preferences, *not necessarily expressed*, then, to avoid the unexpressed problem -- every method would fail -- we have to define how the voter translates the preference onto the ballot. The classic answer is to require that the voter vote "sincerely." But what is that? James Armytage-Green, in a note, struggles with the problem, as I've noted many times. I ended up considering that there were two majority criteria, one involving actual votes, and the other involving mental states, voter preferences, and I did develop a means of transferring the preferences to the ballot that was, in fact, James Armytage Green's, only more directly (and accurately) stated, and it is convoluted enough, involving a double negative, that I really have trouble remembering it! The only way that writers get away with claiming that Approval fails the Majority Criterion, as far as I can see, is that they leave the question of "sincere vote" undefined; if they were to define it, the complexity would be revealed. (But I assume they are sincere, it is easy, particularly for someone very accustomed to considering only ranked methods, to think that it's obvious). Remember, the early writers on this topic were only considering ranked methods, where the translation was simple and did not even need to be stated, it was so obvious.

So, in summary, this is actually a very good topic to have a section on, we now have one, thanks to Mr. Cary, and there is actually some peer-reviewed source for it. It is *connected* with strategic considerations for Approval voting, but isn't the same topic. What is a "sincere Approval vote."? It's about time!

--Abd (talk) 21:35, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. I put the Sincere vote section first as a lead-in for the strategy section. I kept them separate partly because I thought they were each already big enough, because each has potential for growing substantially in size with their own subsections (not including examples), and because each is its own interesting issue. Also, this way a Definition subsection of strategy, if we use one, can focus on just that, defining (multiple ways??) what strategy is, referring as needed to the (various) definition(s), explanations, and examples for sincere voting. That was my reasoning for what I did, but if there is a better way, we should do it. DCary (talk) 22:17, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I find the paragraphs about a second definition of sincere voting to be confusing. From what I can tell after reading the two referenced sources, is that what is being talked about is a definition of sincere vote that assumes the voter has an approval threshold for the candidates. Having an approval threshold would allow the voter to answer the question "Do you approve of this candidate for [whatever the election is about]?" independently of any decision about how to vote and what other candidates there may be. Given such an approval threshold, the sincere vote would be defined to be the vote that votes for all of the approved candidates. Any other vote would not be sincere by that definition. Voting for an unapproved candidate or not voting for an approved candidate would each be insincere. A similar way of expressing this is to talk about the candidates that the voter finds acceptable, rather than those the voter approves. If that is what is being discussed, then any concerns about stronger or weaker candidates, presumably stronger or weaker in terms of which is more likely to win or be in a tie for winning, is irrelevant to the definition. Calling something both an insincere vote and a sincere strategy is perhaps mixing the two definitions. It becomes particularly confusing to a reader who thinks insincere and sincere are both being used according to the second definition. DCary (talk) 01:23, 8 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That is correct; voting systems analysis, with ranked methods, considers only relative preference, and with relative preference, sincerity is simple to define, even if we use the mental state definition. No absolutes are involved. However, when considering Approval voting, the name of the method has apparently caused many, including experts, to think of "approval" as an absolute. But whether I approve of something isn't an absolute, ever. If you give me a ten dollars, no strings attached, would I approve of this? Wouldn't that depend on the options? Ten dollars, on it's own, Great, I approve. Now, make it an election, and the choices are worth, to me, $10, $20, and $100. Any vote in this Approval election that I cast which is "sincere" by the definition considered is abstaining from the election. No, our approval of an outcome depends upon our perception of the opportunities and probabilities. It is always relative. This is why I actually prefer to avoid the term "approval" when discussing the method. These are votes, and the simple definition of a sincere vote in approval is definitely sincere: voting for a candidate and also for every candidate one prefers to that candidate. This says nothing about where one sets the approval cutoff, and the choice of approval cutoff is totally at the option of the voter, and no choice is insincere. Indeed, this was the intention behind the proposals for Approval Voting by Brams et al, for the method to be strategy free. They were correct, but, I think, this offended the proponents of other methods, and they counterattacked, using this slipperiness of definitions and claiming great "vulnerability" of Approval voting to strategic manipulation. It's quite a story, actually, might make a good article for publication.

To repeat this, there is no definition of a sincere vote for a candidate considered in isolation. Generally, when considering the application of the majority criterion to non-ranked methods, writers have had to add to the criterion an assumption that the vote is "sincere," which could be interpreted to mean that it does not conceal a relevant preference. However, instead, what has been done is to define a clearly insincere vote -- which is easy. It is any vote which reverses preference. Then, sincere is defined as a vote which is not insincere. Through this, a vote which conceals the preference involved in the majority criterion is "sincere" if it does not reverse preference. Sure. In a way.

Basically, to apply the majority criterion, one must specify how the internal preference is expressed as a vote. And, it turns out, Woodall, who considers that Approval fails Majority, also considers Plurality to fail Majority (as I recall). This is consistent. However, there is a definition that is fairly convoluted that does successfully cause Plurality to pass and Approval to fail... but the whole point of election criteria was to have some objective means of comparing election methods, and if you can manipulate the definition to make a method pass or fail ... it's pretty dangerous.

But with strategy, a voter who votes a single preference, accurately expressing that the voter prefers this voter over all others, a clearly sincere vote by the definitions used for judging if Approval passes Majority, is considered to have cast an insincere vote if, supposedly, this voter "actually" approves of another as well. This is the nasty strategic bullet voting. I.e., sincere voting, fully expressing a preference. But what if the voter has no preference? Then, certainly, this bullet voting is mere laziness, and isn't, by definition, strategic voting, it does not improve the outcome for the voter. There is some really, really bad thinking going on.

--Abd (talk) 07:20, 9 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As I carefully read the references for the second definition, neither one advocates the second definition. Instead, both rely on the first definition. Niemi briefly considers the second definition on a what-if basis, and then rejects it. Both sources discuss the underlying concepts and their implications without redefining "sincere voting". I think it is appropriate for the article to take a similar approach, unless and until we have reliable sources to support the presentation of an alternative definition. I'll make the changes as part of a larger update to the "Strategic voting" section. DCary (talk) 03:41, 12 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have expanded the section on strategic voting, especially going into more detail on the phenomena previously referenced in the first paragraph in the subsection "Strategy under approval". As part of the changes, I have:

• Renamed and added subsection titles.
• Deleted the second definition of sincere voting, As explained in the Talk:Sincere_voting section, but discussed the underlying concepts of that definition in the subsection "Approval threshold".
• Deleted the sentence about what is strategy under plurality, in part because that sentence was not particularly relevant in this article, and in part because what was really needed was an explanation of the relationship between strategic voting and sincere voting under approval voting.
• Moved the assertion about electing Condorcet winners in practice, for the moment largely unchanged, to the section on "Effects on elections", since that assertion involves little regarding strategy.
• Moved the assertions and refererences about the Burr dilemma, to the section on "Effects on elections", in part because it can be mentioned without specifically discussing strategies. A more detailed discussion of the Burr dilemma and approval voting should delineate that the strategic context for the Burr dilemma is diffferent from what has been detailed so far in the "Strategic voting" section.
• Provided in the examples subsection more and different scenarios that illustrate some of the items that are previously discussed in the section.

DCary (talk) 05:16, 12 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The recent addition in the introduction about how RRO disallows approval voting (diff)seems rather questionable for several reasons:

• It is vague and perhaps misleading. Just because RRO prescribes something else at the quoted location does not mean RRO in general disallows approval voting. Just because RRO does not specifically prescribe approval voting anywhere, does not mean RRO in general disallows approval voting. My understanding is that RRO allows a committee to choose at the committee's discretion whether, when, and how approval voting is used. In that sense, RRO allows approval voting. These distinctions should be clarified if the item is kept in the article.
• Is it OR synthesis? As the above suggests, a broad interpretation of the claim requires an analysis of all of RRO. As such, the claim as currently worded may require reference to a reliable source that makes the claim. Simply quoting a snippet of RRO is just bad OR.
• Is it really important? Is there a reason why this alleged disapproval is worth mentioning? We don't fill every voting system article with particular descriptions of the places where the system is not prescribed.
• It doesn't belong in the introduction. If the item in some form is kept, I don't see a justification for including it in the introduction. The "Other issues and comparisons" section would be a better place. I don't recommend starting a "Situations where approval voting is not used" section, or even a "Situations where approval voting is allowed but not prescribed" section.

DCary (talk) 18:18, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Right, doesn't belong. The quote seems to be about overvotes, same as any existing one vote election system. It should be removed. Tom Ruen (talk) 18:23, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A new article is created as well for Overvote. Tom Ruen (talk) 18:25, 20 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse me if this is either off-topic, or irrelevant. I appreciate the comments that have been made here, but (and I have not read them all, nor claim to understand all that I've read) isn't this discussion missing the role of the parties themselves? Their 'strategic' or tactical choices have to be taken into account, in my opinion. In the example of the city and rural republicans, if the schism between them is so great that voters will not consider supporting them, then it is perhaps 'correct' that a voting system disfavor them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.70.254.248 (talk) 18:03, 24 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It would be great to increase the presentation in the article about candidate or party behavior under approval voting, as long as the information is based on reliable sources and not original research, especially not personal or speculative OR. The only candidate strategy issues that are currently explicitly addressed in the article are about the generalized Burr dilemma. The example given at The dilemma with Approval Voting could be interpreted as illustrating the generalized Burr dilemma, but the presentation of the example devolves into an off-topic OR discussion. This talk page is not a general forum for discussing approval voting, but a place for editors to discuss how to improve the article. See WP:talk for additional guidelines. DCary (talk) 02:45, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This talk section is created for discussing changes to the corresponding section in the article.

I've changed the description of the referenced Science 2001 article by Brams and Herschbach in order to improve accuracy and keep the focus on the the effect of approval voting on elections. The article is an editorial, not the presentation of a study. No study is even referenced. The editorial does not use the term "fairer" or "fair". While the article discusses weaknesses of plurality, Borda, and instant run-off voting, it does not offer an explicit assessment of preference voting in general. I'm not sure exactly what the second sentence is saying, but it does not appear to have any clear basis in the referenced article. DCary (talk) 02:03, 4 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]