skyking162

If you’ve voted in any of the polls over the past few days, you noticed I’m using approval voting instead of plurality voting. The difference can be summed up as “one vote per candidate instead of one vote per voter.” But what are the advantages of approval voting?

The big one is that the winner of an approval vote is likely more popular than a winner of a straight plurality. It leaves open the option of a candidate that’s liked by many, even though he might loved by only a few. For people who want a viable third-party in the U.S., approval voting is the easiest, fastest way to bring that about.

There are other voting systems that accomplish something similar, such as ranked ballots, run-off voting, and match-up voting, but approval voting has the additional benefit of being quick, extremely similar to the system we’re used to, and not affected by ballot manipulation.

Voting theory is a cool topic, one that I discussed in the class I created and taught to 12th graders. For more information and helpful examples, here are some good sites:

Wikipedia
U of Alabama
Tursiops Truncatus Studios

Popularity: 2% [?]

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.