I didn't intend to suggest someone wouldn't vote because they are "paralyzed by indecisiveness." My concern is that people will vote sub-optimally due to poor information about other voters preferences and poor understanding of the strategy involved.

That's a valid concern. http://www.electology.org/score-voting-threshold-strategy argues that in approval voting an honest ballot would give you (by some measure) at least 91% of the impact of a perfect tactical ballot.

An honest vote in first-past-the-post, say for your awesome friend Bob for President, would give you approximately 0% return compared to the proper strategy of voting for the lesser evil of Clinton.

This is a common logical fallacy. I'll explain.

Suppose Approval Voting gives you a utility ("happiness") of 10 if you're tactical, or 9 if you're honest.

Now suppose Voting System X, in which a sincere and tactical vote are obviously identical (ignore the fact that this requires the system to use randomness), gives you a utility of 7.

Now do you _really_ want to take the latter system because there's no disparity in your happiness based on whether you knew the best strategy? Or would you rather take the system that gives you a better result?

More details here. www.electology.org/topic/tactical-voting

I'm sorry, but you've completely missed the point. Nobody is talking about the "disparity in your happiness based on whether you knew the best strategy."

Obviously, if the honest approval ballot give me 9 utility points, and the strategy approval ballot gives me 10 utility points that's better then the system that always give me 7 utility points.

However, it seems to me that the situation is much more along the lines that an honest approval vote gives me 2 utility points, and a strategic one gives me a utility of 9.

See, I hold to political positions that almost always put me in the minority. If I only approved those candidates that that I actually liked, I'd only approve candidates with effectively zero chance of winning. This would let my least favorite candidate win, thus granting me very little utility.

Hence, I'll probably take System X, even if approval voting might, in theory, do better if everyone applied the strategy correctly.

> This is a common logical fallacy. I'll explain.

No, it's not. I agree with you. (But perhaps didn't express that right.)

Actually, that discussion is about an honest score voting ballot, not an honest approval ballot.

Hmm, the author confusingly mixes topics.

Approval Voting is Score Voting on a 0-1 scale. I tried to be clear about the distinctions as they apply. If you can cite any specific sentences that you think could be made clearer, please let me know.

I think I confused myself there.

If you want your site to be usable for drive-by-quoting in an Internet discussion, perhaps you want to make two copies of that text, one specifically for Approval Voting and one for score voting in general?

PS Overall nice website, I am reading more.

Thanks. We've changed platforms a couple of times and have lost some pages and introduced some broken links and "CSS" issues along the way. We need more manpower to make it pretty, but no one cares enough about democracy to give us the millions to invest in such things. :)

This was the original site from years ago: https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/approval-votin...

Ironically, my startup just got through YC and my fingers are crossed that we're successful enough for me to one day fund such reforms, so we'll never be threatened by a Trump again.

Congratulations!

I wonder what the right strategy would be? I guess start small and introduce sensible and simple voting everywhere you can:

- Shareholder votes in a company - Where to go for dinner - Vote for mayor in a small town - ...

Most people don't even know that there are different voting systems, yet alone that some of them are vastly better than others. (It's like watching people play Monopoly, when they are much better games around these days.)

For what it's worth, voting system changes typically result from a two-party system splitting: http://repositori.upf.edu/handle/10230/506. When countries end up with more then two parties, those parties suddenly have an incentive to institute better voting systems. That would suggest you'd have to take out the Republican/Democrat duopoly to change the US system, but perhaps Trump will do some good after all.

Interesting. They had some changes in party systems in the US over the course of the country's life, but did they change the voting system?

Britain also had some changes (with labour replacing liberal at the beginning of the 20th century).

I hail from Germany, which traditionally has a more proportional system. (It's a weird mix that seems to do reasonably well in practice. They could replace the first-past-the-post of the `Erststimme' with a score voting system, but the Erststimme isn't that important anyway.) They never had less than three parties in the federal parliament after WWII, even with a 5% threshold needed to move in.

The UK had three somewhat relevant parties in the 20th century (though only two relevant parties per county). Why haven't they changed electoral system? (And when they had a referendum about it, why did they suggest the dreadful IRV?..)

The USA has had changes of party systems, but never in a way that resulted in a lasting third party.

Certainly there are places like the UK, or my homeland, Canada, that have had three relevant parties for a while without changing the system. Although both UK and Canada have forces pushing for reform. The recently elected government of Canada gave an election promise to change the system, but, well, I'm not holding my breath.

But I'm not saying at all that any country with multiple parties will enact voting reform, but statistically, it seems that voting reform is often brought about that way.

I suspect IRV was brought to vote in the UK, because that was deal that could be reached between the Conservatives who didn't want change, and the Liberal Democrats who did. However, I will note that IRV isn't so bad when selecting members of a legislature. Approval/Condorcet elect compromise candidates, but we don't want to simply have a legislature of compromise candidates, but rather representative of how people voted. But some from of proportional system is probably better.

That's a common logical fallacy. What's important is not "how much utility did I lose by not casting the most optimal vote in Voting System X?" What's important is, "how much utility did I lose by not _using_ Voting System X?"

Explained here with a simple graphic to visualize it. www.electology.org/topic/tactical-voting