Hello all,

The way I see it, the kind of person willing to be an early-adopter is the kind of person with gumption. They’re willing to deal with uncertainty, they’re willing to stake out a claim based on principles, they’re willing to put in a little extra work where it’s needed.

Alight, maybe, maybe not.

But if that sounds like you, I want to recruit you to lead a referendum to switch Ohio or a local government in Ohio to Approval Voting.

If you haven’t heard of Approval Voting before, here it is:

  1. Vote for everyone you like.
  2. Most votes wins.

That’s it.

But OH BOY does it fix a lot of problems. Under Approval, it’s always safe to vote for your favorite candidate. With Approval, you can’t submit an invalid ballot. And best of all, Approval voting doesn’t have spoilers.

Approval Voting helps show how much support every candidate in the race actually has, since there was nothing stopping anyone from voting for them. Everyone’s final total represents their approval rating!

If this sounds like a good deal to you, let me know and we can talk about what it would take to switch your elections to approval. If you have any questions, fire away! I’m even perfectly happy to tell you what kinds of problems and limitations approval has, because all voting systems have problems and limitations!

P.S. I couldn’t find any community specific rules and I’m not sure if this counts as advertising or spam per the site rules but if it does let me know and I’ll delete the post.

P.P.S. I do actually live in Ohio, I’m not gonna go around recruiting people for projects in a state where I don’t live.

  • DaSaw@midwest.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    I do like Approval Voting, but only for single-winner executive situations, or maybe if the entire legislature were on a single ticket. But for regionalized representation, I feel like Approval Voting would result in an excessively moderate result, not only for the ultimate legislative results, but also for the specific individuals, and many very passionate but less moderate individuals would get the feeling they are not represented in the representative body.

    And this, I believe, is what leads to candidates whose sole virtue is a promise of political revenge to people who cannot achieve political representation.

    Not that our current situation is any better. But if we’re looking for improvements to representation, I think the first step would be to have larger districts sending multiple representatives who were chosen by different, non-geographic subgroups.

    • Bob@midwest.socialOP
      2·
      2 years ago

      I totally agree with you on the multi-winner districts.

      Part of the reason I like approval voting is that if can be very naturally expanded to multi-winner elections using Sequential Proportional Approval Voting.

      Basically, the voting is exactly the same, vote for everyone you like, then the first winner is selected as normal. Then, everyone who voted for that winner has their ballots reduced to ½ weight and we tally the votes again to find the next winner. In the third round, if you voted for both winners your ballot counts for ⅓ and if you voted for only 1 of the 2, your ballot counts for ½. Basically, for every winner you have on your ballot, your ballot weight goes down in the next round.

      Doing this helps ensure that very popular candidates still get into office while making it possible for candidates who have enthusiastic supporters (who don’t like anyone else) to make it into office in the later rounds.

      • DaSaw@midwest.social
        3·
        2 years ago

        That’s kind of neat. My main concern with something like that is that the math involved might make it easy for people to undermine the election by sowing confusion about the results.

        Also, I’d like to see a mathematical analysis showing the degree to which halving the votes of everyone who put a popular candidate on their “approved” list ends up amplifying the votes of the minority. I do want more groups represented, but I feel like this system may end up going too far in the other direction. Also, it would encourage a weird kind of strategic voting: people not voting for someone they would actually like because they are too popular, and they don’t want their votes cut by supporting a popular candidate.

        I’ll probably put more thought into it. I’ve never encountered this idea before, so I’m just spitballing for now.

        EDIT: Here’s an idea that might address my second question, but potentially make my first concern even worse. Instead of cutting the value by 1/2, cut it by the ratio between the number of people who supported a winning candidate, and the total number of votes. So, for example, if someone is so great that literally everyone votes for them, this would have no effect on the weight of their vote with regard to other candidates (multiply value by 1/1). If a candidate is so popular 3/4 of voters supported them, multiply their supporters’ votes by 3/4. This would reduce the problem of a vote for a super popular candidate effectively nerfing the votes of those who support them beyond what would be appropriate.

        Of course, this makes the math even more complicated, making it more difficult for people to verify the vote, easier to muddy the water.

        • Bob@midwest.socialOP
          2·
          2 years ago

          Yeah that’s a valid concern! The problem of incredibly popular candidates is somewhat self-correcting no matter what decay method you use. To illustrate this, we can take it to the extreme like you did, and use the 1, ½, ⅓, … decay chain for simplicity’s sake.

          Suppose literally everyone voted for the most popular candidate. Well, okay, in the next round everyone’s votes count for ½ so the relative popularity of each candidate doesn’t change.

          As you lower the popularity of the first winning candidate the few people who didn’t vote for that candidate have twice as much influence in the second round as everyone else. But they’re a small minority, so they’re still going to be fighting against large numbers of people. They might be able to influence who the winner of the second round is, but they’re really going to have to pick between two candidates everyone else likes. The further you lower the popularity of the first winner, well, the less the rest of the population can really be considered a fringe minority.

          The reason for the decay chain is fairly simple. If one of the people you voted for got into office, you’ve got some amount of satisfaction already from the results. Your opinion isn’t invalid, but the amount of joy you get from a second representative is less than the amount of joy other people would get from their first representative.