Disapproval Voting (DV) has practical implications that make it significantly different and possibly superior to Approval Voting (AV), especially if voters are also given the option to vote that they don't disapprove of any candidate, thereby making it clear they are not simply declining to vote. Ballots with neither that option nor any candidates selected would be disregarded. (Note 1: The following comments assume that in a single-winner DV election, the winner would be the candidate who receives the fewest disapproval votes and is not disapproved by a majority of voters. Alternative versions, which I won’t comment on here, might require the winner to receive no more than some smaller percentage of disapproval votes, such as 45% or 40%, to ensure that the winner is not a candidate who barely escapes majority disapproval.) (Note 2: Before writing this, I read the discussions of DV on Wikipedia and the Electorama wiki and didn’t find them very satisfying. If anyone knows of better discussions of DV, please point them out in a response to this post.) 1. One implication is that DV would give voters the option of voting "none of the above" (NOTA) without that option being on the ballot. That is, if every candidate received a disapproval vote from a majority of voters, that would be equivalent to a majority of voters choosing NOTA. Provisions to avoid potential political chaos in the event of a NOTA outcome would need to be made prior to a DV election. For example, the current officeholder could be required to continue in office until a new election were held at some specified future date. In the case of a U.S. presidential election, the term of the current president could be extended for 6 months or a year or whatever other period of time was decided should precede the new election. Also, all candidates in the first election - or all candidates who received above a specified percentage of disapproval votes, such as 60% - could be barred from participating in the new election in order to make another NOTA outcome less likely. 2. Another implication is that DV would enable voters who didn't approve of any candidate (e.g., voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election who didn't much like either Clinton or Trump or any other candidate) to express strong disapproval of candidates they especially disliked or believed were unqualified without having to express positive approval for any candidate. This would make DV far more psychologically and morally acceptable to many voters (myself included, I think) and could affect the outcome of an election as well as the percentage of eligible voters who decided to participate in an election (assuming voters are not required by law to vote). It wouldn't surprise me to learn that DV as described here has major disadvantages that other people with more expertise than I do about evaluating alternative voting methods will be able to point out. If so, or if there are ways to improve on the form of DV described here, I’m very interested in learning about them. (Final note: I'm very busy with another project and won't be able to participate much, if at all, in any discussions of DV that may result from this post. I'll try to keep up but may not weigh in further unless there is something I feel is especially important to respond to of if there is something I need to clarify.) -Ralph Suter