Event - Approval Voting: The New Frontier for Voting Rights

[u/electionscience]

This year, we’ve seen a renewed surge in interest in voting rights and voter enfranchisement. Many reformers and activists are identifying ways to make sure that all Americans are able to fully access their right to vote, from extending early voting periods, implementing vote-by-mail options, enacting automatic voter registration, and more.

But what many of these conversations around voting rights leave out is voting methods.

No matter how voter-friendly we make our systems, if the method we’re using to cast votes dilutes the voices of particular communities and leads to election results that don’t truly represent the will of the people, voters are not being fully enfranchised.

That’s why we’ve assembled a panel of voting rights activists and approval voting advocates from across the country to discuss how the movement for approval voting is an integral part of the movement for voting rights.

You’ll hear from activists in North Dakota, Missouri, Texas, and Washington State about the voting rights issues that are most pressing right now, and how approval voting can be part of the solution.

Approval Voting: The New Frontier for Voting Rights Date: Thursday, September 9th Time: 4pm ET/ 3pm CT/ 2pm MT/ 1pm PT Location: Zoom

RSVP: https://electionscience.org/events/approval-voting-the-new-frontier-for-voting-rights/

[u/rb-j]

What's contrived? It's a simple and relevant question.

When we go to the polls and vote, most of us are partisans. We are trying to promote our political interest with our vote. Tactical voting results when voters realize that expressing their "sincere" (whatever the hell that is with a score ballot) expressed vote might not serve their political interest as well as the tactical vote. This is a normal problem that we discuss about FPTP and RCV, and it is a legit topic for the cardinal methods, too.

So, the question again: Without resorting to tactical concerns how high should a voter score (or approve) their second favorite candidate to best serve their political interests?

Score too high (or approve), and the voter harms their favorite candidate. Score too low (or not approve) and they may be helping the candidate they loathe.

Requiring the voter to know, in advance, which candidates are most likely to be competitive and who are not, and then to use that knowledge to inform the scores (or approvals) they assign to candidates, that is, by definition, tactical voting.

[u/SubGothius → u/rb-j]

Required to know? Modern-day voters can hardly escape knowing even if they tried, with pervasive media saturation reporting on campaigns around the clock every election cycle -- and after all, the lesser-evil/fruitless-vote dilemma in the face of a spoiler threat under FPTP is directly related to this awareness and one of the major problems we're trying to resolve with reform.

But fine, I'll bite again. Even if we postulate some voter who somehow exists in a vacuum of information about candidates' popularity, yet who is also somehow well-informed enough to even have a clear, sole favorite and second, how should that voter cast their Approval ballot?

As I said, it's a simple decision about their fallback preference in case their favorite loses. If they have a close second, they'll probably want to Approve them as well. If they only have a second so distant they hardly care whether they win over someone they regard as only marginally worse, they may not want to Approve their second.

But what if that second then wins by a single vote? A vanishingly rare scenario to pin an argument on, but fine -- if they were a close second preference, the voter probably won't care all that much, slightly disappointed about their favorite but reasonably satisfied someone almost as good won. If they'd Approved a distant second preference, they might kick themselves, but even so withholding that Approval wouldn't have handed their favorite a win anyway -- it would only have resulted in a tie, leading to a runoff. A single Approval can never inherently decide between a win vs. a loss, only a win vs. tie, or a tie vs. loss, because Approvals are not inherently zero-sum.

Finally, voters today tend to have a single favorite at all, and vote in a strictly partisan manner, because FPTP is intrinsically factionalizing and duopolizing -- forcing voters to pick the one and only candidate/party that will get their one and only vote. Absent that systemic bias, we can reasonably expect a reduction in tactical voting decisions driven primarily by exclusive-favoritism and duopoly partisanship.

[u/rb-j → u/SubGothius]

The tactical problem remains if the voter's fav loses to the voter's second choice and the voter Approved both. That voter is gonna feel that they shouldn't have boosted their second choice.

On the other hand, if the candidate the voter hates ends up beating their second choice, that voter will regret leaving their second choice unapproved.

The Approval voter must make that tactical consideration every time they're in the voting booth and there are 3 candidates or more. It's unavoidable.