ATVBT Approves of Approval Voting

Here is the election endorsement I know you've all been waiting for: (one author from) ATVBT is officially endorsing approval voting.

When I was in high school I was for some reason assigned to a committee to redesign the student government electoral system.[^1] Being in my time and place and susceptible (as so many of us are) to the Expert Consensus of the day, I helped select and implement a Ranked Choice Voting system. I had read somewhere that this was the mathematically fairest voting system, avoided pitfalls of First Past The Post, enabled the election of better, more-consensusy candidates, etc etc etc.[^2]

The best argument against Ranked Choice Voting is a five minute conversation with the average voter. And this is a knock on the voting system, not the voters: RCV is simply not comprehensible to any normal person putting a normal amount of effort into understanding their electoral system. This is a Crucial Consideration that the boffins at Election Theory University missed at the time: one of the most important elements of democracy is that voters 1) understand how the system works 2) understand why it reached a particular outcome in a particular case, and 3) feel that the outcome is fair and valid. It honestly isn't sufficient for a voting system to have good mathematical properties if voters don't feel that the outcome is fair and valid.

To be clear, First Past The Post doesn't exactly clear this hurdle either. On the one hand, it does have a strong (and meaningful!) incumbency advantage: because it's been in use for years, and we were taught in elementary school that This Is What Democracy And Therefore Fairness Looks Like, for many of us it has an automatic bonus in terms of how Legitimate its outcome feels. Again, this isn't "fair" in some cosmic sense but it is real! Perceptions of legitimacy may be circular but they're still real.

At the same time, I think modern history shows that FPTP so-consistently "forces" voters to choose between two candidates they actually dislike, and either prevents other candidates from running in the first place or guilts voters out of expressing their actual preferences, that [citation needed] both electoral participation and perceived legitimacy of the government keep finding new rocks underneath the previous rock bottoms. And as I said earlier, I think this is disqualifying for an electoral system regardless of its other fine properties.

This is why I have now switched my vote on voting-systems to Approval Voting: voters get a list of candidates and mark their Approval of as many candidates as they like, i.e. the ones they'd be happy to see in office. Whoever gets the most approvals, wins.

Your immediate objection to this could (should?) be that Approval Voting could create weird strategic voting incentives, e.g. if I prefer Anna to Betty and Betty to Charlotte, I might have a dilemma over whether to list approval of Just Anna or Anna And Also Betty, and this decision might determine who actually gets elected. (Ranked Choice doesn't have this problem, because I get to rank my choices in order).

The experts tell me that – perhaps surprisingly! – Approval Voting captures many of the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting anyway. I will be honest that I have read very little of this, and certainly not taken the time to follow the maths, so in a sense I am doing no better than when I was 16.

My approval of approval voting is based on two things:

1) I feel confident that the average voter would understand what their vote means and how votes are tabulated. (Well, at least somewhat confident – would need to see it in action more to know).

2) I believe the long-run equilibrium dynamics of Approval Voting would be much better than FPTP.

Basically, a long-shot candidate running under Approval Voting systems can tell their voters "please approve me and this mainstream candidate who is more likely to win."

If the long-shot candidate outperforms expectations, even though they didn't win, they're better set up to run a credible campaign in future, AND the establishment parties will have a clear signal of what voters care about that they should incorporate into their own platforms, AND we'll get an actual gauge of candidate popularity for things like debate participation and election financing, which currently often exclude long-shot candidates in a self-fulfilling circular dynamic.

Effectively, FPTP destroys useful information about voter's actual preferences, which then feeds into future elections as well, such that its properties in a single election are not the only thing that should be worried about – surely this has been written up elsewhere, very possibly I read it and stole it, but I don't actually remember hearing this consideration when reading up on voting systems as a kid.

Ranked Choice preserves even more information than Approval Voting, but I think that's outweighed by its downsides.

Almost-every policy I've supported in my life has had new and exciting downsides once implemented in practice, so presumably there's ways that Approval Voting would skew outcomes that I haven't yet predicted. But still, out of the candidates, it's the one that gets my vote.

[^1]: incidentally, I don't think Student Governments should be called Governments because they have no power to Govern; they should rather be called the club for representing student interests in front of the administration that actually governs, or club for allocating a small budget to make students lives' slightly funner, or something.

[^2]: Our first election wound up as a draw, something I had been told was EXTREMELY rare, perhaps because the people writing about RCV were not including the maths for a group of fewer than 50 people.