Four Republican New Hampshire state representatives have introduced a bill for Approval Voting for all office. They are Frank Edelblut, Eric Schlein, Dan McGuire, and Keith Ammon. HB 1521 has a hearing in the House Election Law Committee on Tuesday, January 19, at 1:15 p.m. Thanks to Darryl Perry for this news.
Approval voting lets voters vote for as many candidates as they wish, even if only one is to be elected. It is possible the legislators were motivated to introduce this bill because they feel it would improve the presidential primary process.
The United Coalition is proud of the timetable for elections in Syria.
Read news about the United Coalition from out of of Foreign Affairs Ministry in Lebanon below:
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http://usaparliament.wix.com/usa-parliament#!????????-????????-??????-??????-???-?????-?????????-??-?????-?????-???????-????-???????-USA-Parliament-stand-with-the-ongoing-situation-in-Syria-solution-is-an-internal-matter/skbv1/5697509b0cf2103831913149
I have to wonder if there’s some hope to blunt Trump with this, since he benefits from the spoiler effect.
This system has a fundamental flaw if used down the entire ballot.
Say we have three sets of candidates from three parties:
A. Republican
B. Libertarian
C. Democratic
The Republican voters are okay with voting for the Republicans and are content with Libertarians; so they go ‘A’ & ‘B’ all the way down the ballot
The Democratic voters are okay with voting for the Democrats and are content with Libertarians; so they go ‘C’ & ‘B’ all the way down the ballot.
Most Libertarians are against both Repubs and Dems, so they primarily vote straight Libertarian; so they mostly go ‘B’ all the way down the ballot, with a few minor deviations also checking a Repub or Dem for some races.
We now have a Libertarian oligarchy. I can see it for Executive branches (Governor and President) but you have to use IRV and proportional for the legislature to break it up.
There is a hearing on January 19.
Interestingly, the only statutory change is to permit a voter to cast a vote for as many candidates as they want, without spoiling the ballot – and change the instructions from “vote for not more than three” with an instruction indicating the number to be elected.
There are ways to count approval ballots in multi-member districts that provide for proportional elections, without the need to game the system as is done under cumulative voting. This would also eliminate the need for partisan primaries.
New Hampshire has many multi-member districts for its House of Representatives.
Approval voting is not proportional representation. On the contrary, it allows a majority of voters to win a super-majority of the seats.
The only system that guarantees fairness is pure proportional representation (PR).
The 9th USA Parliament has neen using PR for twenty consecutive years and it works fine.
AMcCarrick,
Your example is highly improbable. In fact, most critics of Approval Voting (e.g. FairVote) make precisely the opposite argument—that everyone will just vote for their favorite.
The reality is somewhere in between those two extremes. You basically want to vote for the same person you would with choose-one Plurality Voting, plus everyone you like better.
So those Democrats and Republicans in your example would mostly want to bullet vote.
As for Libertarian voters, polls have historically shown that a huge percentage of third party supporters tend to insincerely vote for their favorite of the major party candidates. With Approval Voting, they’d still often have that same strategy, but they’d also be able to vote Libertarian.
I’ve studied this issue for nearly a decade, and co-founded The Center for Election Science. We’ve looked at numerous exit poll experiments, as well as real contentious Approval Voting elections. It very well supports this expectation.
Approval Voting is simpler and radically superior to Instant Runoff Voting.
http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
@Ogle,
Approval ballots can be counted in a way that provides proportionality in multi-seat elections.
Clay seems like your ‘work’ has no peer review either. Anybody can get a team of like-minded people together and go off a start professing biased opinion as fact.
AMcCarrick,
All of our claims on Approval Voting can be easily verified, and many of them are just objective mathematical facts. For instance:
– Approval Voting satisfies the “Favorite Betrayal Criterion”, meaning it cannot possibly hurt you to vote for your favorite candidate. Whereas IRV _can_ punish you for ranking your favorite candidate in first place. This happened in the 2009 IRV mayoral race in Burlington, VT for instance.
– Approval Voting is precinct summable, whereas IRV is not.
– Approval Voting can be counted on regular voting machines with no upgrades, whereas IRV cannot.
Also in 2010, the Voting Power and Procedures department at the London School of Economics convened a team of voting experts to study 18 methods. They picked Approval Voting as best (and Plurality Voting as worst, not surprisingly).
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2011/04/VotingSystems.aspx
See also the straw poll we conducted at the Republican Liberty Caucus.
scorevoting.net/RLCstrawPoll2015.html
One of the conductors of that poll was CES board member Andy Jennings, who did his math PhD thesis in voting methods. This was a contested poll, where candidates like Rand Paul showed up to speak.
P.R. legislative bodies.
App.V. executive/judicial offices.
— pending Condorcet head to head math — using Number Votes and an Approval Voting tiebreaker —
for ALL offices.
Another article on the topic:
https://politics.concordmonitor.com/2016/01/politics-election/dont-want-to-vote-for-just-one-candidate-bills-would-allow-multiple-votes/
Scanlan’s concerns about fairness are wrong.
https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/approval-voting#TOC-Doesn-t-Approval-Voting-violate-one-person-one-vote-