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Approval voting

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Approval Voting is Under-Rated (Score: 5, Insightful)

by prospectacle@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 07:22 (#KH)

Good work on choosing approval voting!

Single-vote (first past the post) methods are terrible methods of translating voter will into meaningful results. They discourage most people from voting and most candidates from running, and produce divisive results (see american presidential elections). If most people dislike a particular candidate, it can still win, because the vote against it may be split between the other options, since people can only express their first preference, and nothing else.

Preferential (ranked) voting systems can be ok, but it gets complicated when you decide how to count the preferences. If you use instant-runoff (eliminate the least popular candidate if there is no majority, then re-distribute the second-preferences from those votes. Repeat until someone has a majority) is divisive, because most people who didn't vote for whoever ends up winning, do not get their preferences counted at all. This is because their first-preference option doesn't get eliminated before a majority is reached by another candidate.

There are some decent preferential systems (e.g. borda count, kemeny-young), but they all suffer from arrow's impossibility theorem (which shows that they're all flawed in some key aspects).

Approval voting is simple to use, simple to count, and tends to produce consensus results.

This site doesn't appear to have a whole team of volunteers like SoylentNews (which I also like), so progress is slower, but I very much like and admire the effort. Consider me sold.

Re: Approval Voting is Under-Rated (Score: 3, Insightful)

by ploling@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 10:00 (#KN)

Love the site/html, beautiful and clean. Like the fresh approach to the strength of Slash-style moderation.

I like the voting system and it would be a huge step up for most systems (particularly political ones).

That said by starting to vote it got me thinking:
- I happen to only have two definite positive preferences I'll vote for, those are easy.
- Then among the remaining five options (not counting the NSA one) there are some I really don't want or want to hold back until a future date, I obviously don't want to vote for those, so those are easy.
- But since I've only chosen two out of seven options I could be wasting my influence if I don't push for at least some of the options that aren't outright "bad" in my opinion. It could end up weakening my own choices or it could end up weakening the choices I want to avoid, this starts to get hard.

It's like ranking without ranking; if I vote for all options I might as well not vote and if I vote for none I'm not voting so those two examples are the extremes and intuitively that tells me I should try to choose roughly half of the options XD

Maybe I'm just evil¹ :3

¹ "lawful chaotic" chaotic? *head asplodes*

P.S. I would like (more) unicode support but I'm in no rush , the code barfs at superscript 1 unless it's written using predefined html entities (ampersand sup1 semicolon) but on preview it changes the html entity (numeric doesn't work either) in the comment entry box to the character so if you preview it twice or preview and post it will fubar all over the place :o

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2014-03-16 13:31 Normal 0 dbcubix@pipedot.org
2014-03-17 08:02 Insightful +1 scott@pipedot.org
2014-03-18 17:30 Interesting +1 songofthepogo@pipedot.org

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