Hi Rob,

I like the MAF proposal. I've posted in favor of PR approval based runoff
methods before, almost exactly 2 years ago, in fact.

My only caveat would be that there is a theoretical possibility that
including everyone who gets more than 50% approval could introduce a clone
crowding effect.  Do you want any limits on the number?

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 23:41 Rob Lanphier <robla@robla.net wrote:

Hi Ted,

Hmm....I have a tweak to the proposal to run by you.  More below...

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 5:31 PM Ted Stern dodecatheon@gmail.com wrote:

Thanks!  My proposal comes with a bit of naivety about prior
proposals.  In the past, I've sent an "oh, I have an idea" post it to
this list, and then someone replies "you mean Coombs?" and I ask
"what's Coombs?" and then someone (possibly after emitting a heavy
sigh) composes a very educational email detailing what Coombs is.

I'm assuming the proposal you're talking about is this one:
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2016-November/001054.html

I just read it, and I concur.  Applying proportional-style approval
voting to electoral college selection is a neat idea.  The MAF step 2
in my proposal seems to use a very similar mechanism to the one you
describe.  My proposal below might be even more similar...

The clone problem has been in the back of my mind for a while; I'm
glad you brought it up.  A solution that just occurred to me: what if
we generalized the MAF step 2 mechanism.  So, here's the MAF rules in
my blog post yesterday (er...make that Tuesday):

1. The candidate who receives the highest approval rating qualifies
   for the general election
2. If less than 75% approve of the leading candidate, then a second
   candidate (the “complementary candidate”), who maximizes the approval
   of the electorate, also qualifies
3. All candidates who receive over 50% approval also qualify for the
   general election

For a dominant party like the Democratic Party in California in 2018,
under this system, their motivation would be to run as many Democrats
as possible, and hope they all make it to the general election.

What if instead, for all candidates who qualify via step 1 or step 3
(getting between 50% and 75% of the vote), an opposition candidate is
chosen?  If the left-wing/right-wing model persists for a while, it
basically means that every Democrat/Green/PeaceAndFreedom candidate
who advances by getting 50% approval, there could be a
Republican/Libertarian/AmericanIndependent who also advances.  If the
Republican and Democratic parties remain dominant, there would
probably be an R for every D, but of course, once people start getting
comfortable approving an army of clones, it could be that clone
coalitions form that bring in these third parties. For reference,
here's the certified political parties in California:
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/political-parties/qualified-political-parties/

(and don't hold me to my assessment that
"Democrat/Green/PeaceAndFreedom" == "left" and
"Republican/Libertarian/AmericanIndependent == "right"...I'm a little
uninformed about the nuances of our third parties, and also realize
that, for example, Libertarians would balk at being called "right
wing" in the left/right model)

Advancing an army of clones invites an army of complementary
candidates, so I suspect that would motivate partisan voters to be
stingy about approving an army of clones, and to motivate
parties/coalitions to thin their ranks a little before the primary and
publish focused endorsements, and to motivate candidates to drop out
before the primary if the field is too crowded.

Perhaps a way of formalizing this mechanism would be to change to this
set of rules:

1. Select the candidate who receives the highest approval rating.
   This is the "top candidate" and qualifies for the ballot
   1a. If the top candidate (and any other candidate) receives greater
   than 75% approval, add these candidates to the "highly-approved
   candidate pool"
   1b. If the top candidate receives less than 75% approval, add the top
   candidate to the "majority candidate pool"
2. If the top candidate has been added to the "majority candidate
   pool", also add a candidate to the “opposition candidate pool”.  To be
   added, this candidate must be the candidate which maximizes the
   "majority/opposition ballot satisfaction".  "ballot satisfaction"
   generally means voters approve of at least one candidate on a given
   ballot.  "majority/opposition ballot satisfaction" is for a ballot
   that only contains the "majority candidate pool" and the "opposition
   candidate pool".
3. For each candidate who receives over 50% approval, but less than
   75% approval:
   3a.  Add this candidate to the "majority candidate pool"
   3b.  Add a candidate to the "opposition candidate pool" who maximizes
   the "majority/opposition ballot satisfaction" of the electorate (as in
   step 2)
4. Eliminate all candidates from the "opposition candidate pool" who
   have an overall approval rating under 25%
5. All candidates remaining in the "highly-approved candidate pool",
   the "majority candidate pool" and the "opposition candidate pool"
   advance to the general election.

In the original MAF proposal, the "opposition candidate pool" (i.e.
the "complementary candidate") is no more than one candidate.  In this
proposal, the opposition candidate pool could grow to two candidates
if two candidates are added to the majority candidate pool..

This doesn't seem like a radical departure from the rules I described
in my Tuesday blog post.  The added complexity bothers me, but this
seems to solve a problem with the original proposal.  In the old
proposal, the single complementary candidate is chosen as an
alternative to the leading candidate, even if a third candidate is
also added.  In this proposal, it would seem rare to advance just
three candidates; either there's one candidate in each pool ("highly
approved", "majority", "opposition") or there as a candidate pruned
from the "opposition candidate pool" for being under 25% approval.

My hunch: it would take at least 2-3 election cycles before more than
two candidates advance to the general.  I suspect bullet voting would
be common in early elections, and it would take a while before
sophisticated campaign strategies emerge (e.g. like candidates
endorsing each other, holding joint events, and advertising for one
another).  Most elections would result in a single "majority"
candidate, and an "opposition" candidate.

I came up with the set of rules above as I was composing this email,
because I wanted to make the rules fit the examples below.  My first
draft had rules ensuring that if the majority candidate pool had N
candidates, the opposition candidate pool would only have N-1
candidates. In this version, it's possible for the opposition
candidate pool to have just as many candidates as the majority
candidate pool.  But it didn't match my examples below, and I liked my
examples better than I liked my draft rules, so I rewrote the rules.
Now that I have rules I like, I've tweaked my example scenarios to fit
the rules:

Test scenario #1: Let's say that seven candidates qualify to advance,
and the top candidate only receives 55% approval.  It seems that the
order that the primary candidates should enter their respective pools
should be like this:
#1 - Top candidate - first in majority candidate pool
#2 - first in opposition candidate pool (complementing the top
candidate in the majority pool)
#3 - second in majority candidate pool (with 54% approval)
#4 - second in opposition candidate pool (complementing the candidates
above in the majority pool)
#5 - third in majority candidate pool (with 53% approval)
#6 - third in opposition candidate pool (complementing the candidates
above in the majority pool)
#7 - fourth in majority candidate pool (with 52% approval)
#8 - fourth in opposition candidate pool (complementing the candidates
above in the majority pool)

In my original draft, the candidate with the lowest overall approval
score would be eliminated from the opposition pool so that the
majority pool had four candidates, and the opposition pool only had
three, and thus only seven candidates advanced.  In my current rules,
it's possible for eight candidates to qualify, but my new rule #4
above ("Eliminate all candidates from the opposition candidate pool
who have an overall approval rating under 25%") could knock it down to
seven.  Or six,  Or even four.

Test scenario #2: Let's say the top candidate gets greater than 75%
approval. That's a pretty strong indication that the top candidate is
the median candidate.  But if three other candidates also get greater
than 50% approval, it only seems fair to give them a hearing in the
general election.  Thus, when the top candidate gets greater than 75%
approval, it seems the order should go like this:
1 - Top candidate - first in highly-approved candidate pool
2 - first in majority candidate pool
3 - first in opposition candidate pool (complementing the first
candidate in the majority candidate pool)
4 - second in majority candidate pool
5 - second in opposition candidate pool (complementing the candidates
above in the majority candidate pool)
6 - third in majority candidate pool
7 - third in opposition candidate pool (complementing the candidates
above in the majority candidate pool)

I originally wrote "I'm pretty sure it'd be possible to write a set of
rules to achieve this.  I'm just not going to do it tonight".  I
think I pulled it off.  That's why I didn't send this mail a couple
hours ago.  Now I really should send this email.  :-)

Rob
p.s for those of you who prefer reading blog stuff on Medium (or feel
like clicking on the applause link), here's the Medium version of this
proposal:
https://medium.com/@robla/replacing-the-jungle-primary-c1e844a5333b

Hi Rob,

The thread I was referring to was actually one that included the following
comment, which introduced a complementary approval candidate similar to
your own:

http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2016-November/000991.html

But my later suggestion was related, so no problem.

Regarding your modification suggestion, I'm not sure that you fixed
anything.  Including everyone above 50% approval potentially creates an
over-crowded ballot.  However, as Chris Benham states in the included post
above, Approval Winner plus complementary (or, as I like to call it,
excluded) approval winner could lead to Condorcet violation.

Let's imagine a Condorcet-like election with a score ballot with more than
two ratings, so it's not just approval.  Say 0 to 3, with any score above
zero indicating approval.

Infer rankings from the ratings (higher score ranks above lower score), and
tabulate the pairwise array.

Then advance the following candidates to the general election:  the Smith
set, plus the Approval winner, plus the AW-complement.  This group is
guaranteed to include the Condorcet winner, plus at least one other
candidate.  If desired, according to your criterion above, you could also
include the AW-runner-up.

On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 1:12 AM Rob Lanphier robla@robla.net wrote:

Hi Ted,

Thanks for pointing back to the conversation Chris Benham started.  I
need to read and fully absorb that conversation, but I'm going to try
replying in advance of that.  More inline...

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 1:27 PM Ted Stern dodecatheon@gmail.com wrote:

If a candidate requires 50% approval to advance to the general
election ballot (to get into the "majority candidate pool" as I call
it in my 2018-11-22 email), I have a hard time believing that an
"overcrowded ballot" will really be a problem.  If people become
familiar enough with approval voting that a majority of voters are
approving a large number of candidates, that seems like a really good
problem to have.  In some of the offline conversations I've had, I've
received pushback that 50% approval is way too high.  It seems that if
we get an overcrowded ballot because we allow every candidate that has
50% approval to advance, then by definition, a majority of the
electorate wants an overcrowded ballot. Plus, it seems like there
are policy countermeasures that could be introduced as disincentives
for a unified block of candidates to operate this way (e.g. having a
fixed pool of money for public campaign financing divided evenly among
the candidates in the majority candidate pool)

As you point out, my "Majority Approval Filter" MAF draft proposals
also call for allowing an "opposition candidate pool" to advance, such
that it's possible for candidates with lower than 50% approval to
advance.  My initial draft (from my 2018-11-20 email) allowed for
exactly one candidate to advance via the opposition candidate pool.
My second draft (from my 2018-11-22 email) allowed for an opposition
candidate pool that could be potentially as large as the majority
candidate pool.

I'm probably going to use electowiki to create a third draft of MAF
when I get around to it.  More about that below...

I did some reading of the prior discussions on this topic.  In
particular, I looked at Chris's email:
[EM] Top-two Approval Pairwise Runoff (TTAPR)
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2016-November/000991.html

...which in turn refers to earlier conversations (e.g. "earlier
suggestion of mine for a 2 trips to the polling station method using
simple Approval ballots."). In my brief scan of those conversations, I
found this as a possible entry point:
"A better 2-round method that uses approval ballots"
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2013-June/097206.html

I'm not sure I get how a Condorcet winner violation can occur with
MAF, and I don't know which of Chris Benham's earlier suggestions
you're pointing me to.  I'm willing to believe there's something
obvious I'm missing (because that happens a lot), but there's nothing
obvious to me yet about that reference.

One possible interpretation: my "Maximum approval top-two"  MATT
proposal from 2018-11-20 is subject to a Condorcet winner violation.
I'll acknowledge that that is true, since not every candidate in the
majority candidate pool advances in MATT.

At this point, though, I'm planning to refine and advocate for MAF.
MATT is a proposal-of-last-resort if (for whatever reason) it becomes
impossible to advance an initiative that replaces the general election
first-past-the-post voting method with a system that works well with
three or more candidates.  MAF is great since (if my hunch is correct)
it will usually only advance two candidates (at least at first), and
thus won't seem so weird to voters that are used to California's
current system that exclusively advances two candidates per office.

This is an interesting solution to the problem that isn't obvious to
me yet.  As of right now, I'm not yet convinced that we need to make a
more complicated ballot than an approval ballot for the primary.
Moreover, I think there's tremendous benefit to allowing both the
primary election and the general election to use the same
approval-style ballot instructions.

Here's the end goal for my requirements for a third draft of MAF,
using similar vocabulary as my 2018-11-22 proposal: 1) advance three
pools of candidates ("highly-approved candidate pool", "majority
candidate pool", "opposition candidate pool") to the general election.
2) provide electoral motivation for candidates to maximize their
overall approval score, and not obsess about their base voters 3)
ensure the resulting general election ballot achieves a very high
"ballot satisfaction" score.

My first draft had a rather arbitrary and small opposition candidate
pool (one candidate).  My second draft probably has one that is too
big.  I've got ideas for my third draft that I think passes the
Goldilocks test  :-)

Rob

Hi Rob,

Thanks for pointing me to Chris Benham's Approval runoff suggestion from
2013.  With what I have learned since 2016 it makes more sense now.

In that light, I'm getting toward being on board with your MAF idea.
However, I'm still unclear on how you set up the opposition candidate pool.

So I understand you have the Approval Winner (AW), plus, if AW's approval
is less than a threshold, all candidates with approval > 50% and
complementary approved candidates.  The question is, after you have chosen
the first complementary approved candidate, the candidate who is approved
on the most ballots that don't approve AW, how do you form the complement
for the other opposition candidates?

In my opinion, when you have a runner up highly approved candidate, the
complementary candidate should be the candidate with highest approval on
ballots that don't approve of the runner-up, not the AW.  And if that
complementary opposition candidate is already in the runoff, take the
next-highest approved on those ballots until you find a new candidate.

For example, if the approval winner is A with approval less than the
dominance threshold, also include complementary opposition candidate B
(highest approved on ballots that don't approve A), plus highly approved
runner up C with approval > 50%, plus complementary opposition candidate D
(highest approved candidate who is not A or B, on ballots that don't
approve C).  If there is another highly approved runner up E with approval

non-(A,B,C,D) candidate on ballots that don't approve of E.  And so on.

What do you think?

Hi Ted,

Thanks for helping refine the idea.  More inline:

On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 12:57 PM Ted Stern dodecatheon@gmail.com wrote:

Cool!

So am I.  Before I respond to the rest of this, I'm going to lay out
some goals that occurred to me as I started thinking through my reply.
As I type these words, I have no idea whether or not your method
complies with the goals I set out.

Here's the main goal: an Approval-based system that advances truly
viable candidates to the general election, creating a ballot approved
by a large portion of the electorate (i.e. with a high ballot
satisfaction score)

Now to assign some arbitrary metrics to the subjective terms expressed
or implied above:

• "viable candidate" - a candidate who receives greater than 25%
  approval in the primary
• "truly viable candidate" - a candidate who receives greater than
  50% approval in the primary
• "marginally viable candidate" - a candidate who receives less than
  50% approval, but greater than 25%
• "non-viable candidate" - a candidate who receives less than 25%
  approval in the primary
• "ballot satisfaction score" - percentage of primary election voters
  who approve of at least one candidate on a ballot containing a given
  subset of primary election candidates
• "high ballot satisfaction score" - Greater than 90% ballot satisfaction

A rough outline for MAF version 3:

• Identify the approval winner, and advance that candidate
• Advance all truly viable candidates (>50% approval)
• Advance a small number of marginally viable candidates to create a
  ballot with a high ballot satisfaction score (>90% ballot
  satisfaction)

That last step is one that I'm still trying to figure out.  There's a
couple of testcases that I'm still trying to think though, and design
MAF v3 around:

Testcase A: Let's say that after we select all truly viable
candidates, we only have a ballot satisfaction score of 85%.  Let's
also say that among the marginally viable canidates we have candidate
A1, who is the next highest rated candidate that has 49.9% approval,
but only just barely brings the ballot satisfaction score to 90%.
Let's say there's a different candidate (A2) who only receives 35%
approval, but brings the ballot satisfaction score up to 99%.  I think
my preference in that case is to have an algorithm that selects
candidate A1.

Testcase B: Once again, after all truly viable candidates (TVCs), we
only have a 85% ballot satisfaction.  Let's say that B1 is next
highest, with 45%, but only brings the ballot satisfaction to 86%.
Next is B2, with 44%.  Adding B2 to the ballot also only gets us to
86% satisfaction, and adding both B1 and B2 only gets us to 87%
(TVCs+B1+B2=87%).  Let's say we keep stepping through the marginally
viable candidates, and we only get 1% at a time, such that
TVCs+B1+B2+B3+B4+B5=90%.  However, let's also say there's a candidate
B9 that only has 35% overall approval, but adding that candidate alone
would improve the ballot satisfaction score to 99%.  I think I would
prefer an algorithm that selects B9 rather than adding (B1, B2, B3,
B4, B5).

It could be very difficult to find an elegant algorithm that selects
A1 for Testcase A, and B9 for Testcase B.  Now to see what your
proposal does....

That's what I'm still struggling with.

I think we agree on the first point.  The complementary opposition
candidate should be complementary to the candidate(s) that barely get
greater than 50% approval, not to the Approval Winner (AW).  The best
algorithm may involve starting with the truly viable candidate with
the lowest approval rating (e.g. a candidate with 50.01% approval) and
working our way up to the AW until we have an acceptable ballot
satisfaction score.

I fear that this algorithm would bias toward selecting candidates A2
and B9 in my test cases up above.  Both of those candidates are likely
to be the most polarizing candidates, most inclined to rile up their
base voters without aspiring to achieve 50% approval.

An elegant algorithm that selects A1 and B9 might be hard to come by.
My preference for B9 over (B1, B2, B3, B4, B5) is not very strong, and
in fact, it may be that reducing the minimum ballot satisfaction score
from 90% to 85% might be the right solution for that particular test
case (thus not allowing B1, B2, B3, B4, B5 or B9).  "90%" and "85%"
are arbitrary percentages, and in fact, maybe 75% is high enough.
There would be a certain elegance to choosing the same percentage
(75%) for both the "highly approved candidate pool" and the "high
ballot satisfaction score".  That would be great motivation for
candidates to try to get to 75% approval; by doing so, they could lock
out marginally viable candidates from the general election ballot.
But candidates getting greater than 75% approval would still have to
face other highly viable candidates (candidates between 50% and 75%)
in the general election.

Rob

Hi Rob,

What you're describing with your percent satisfaction sounds a lot like
Proportional Representation, though the context of a primary is quite
different.

I come from the school of "challenge makes you stronger", so I would
welcome more contrasting voices into the general election.

I think that including the complementary opposition winners against your
"truly viable candidates" would be a way to do that.

You're more likely to get engagement and consequent turnout when more
people feel like their voices are being heard in the debate. A slate of
blandly similar center seekers would be a recipe for voter apathy.

If the viable candidates are A_1 (= Approval Winner), A_2 (Approval runner
up), etc., with complementary opponents B_1, B_2, etc., then I think it
would be appropriate to add them in (A_i, B_i) pairs until your desired
representation level is met.

Actually, I don't know if I would put the truly viable cutoff at 50%. In a
true jungle primary, you might end up with only 40% winners at the
highest.  I might go down to 33. 3% A_i candidates if that's what it takes
to get at least 66.6% voter representation.

Ted

On Mon, Dec 3, 2018, 17:51 Rob Lanphier <robla@robla.net wrote:

Hi Ted,

This has been an incredibly helpful discussion!  More inline...

On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 11:11 PM Ted Stern dodecatheon@gmail.com wrote:

Yeah, I think we may have been educated in the same school. ;-)  I
would welcome contrasting voices too, to a point.  An approval-based
primary should only advance candidates who are trying to ultimately
get a high approval rating in the general election.  The primary
election should select candidates with the desire and ability to earn
the approval of a majority of voters during the general election
cycle, rather than wasting the time and energy of the general election
electorate who may not have the time or patience to evaluate
candidates who aren't serious contenders.

Ted also wrote:

My hope is that after a few years, primary election voters become
accustomed to the system.  They might then stop approving bland
center-seekers, and start approving exciting center-seekers.  Or maybe
bland but incredibly competent center seekers.  Voters would hopefully
be at liberty to stop being overly-focused on the left-right
continuum, and start looking at other dimensions (e.g.
competence-incompetence, honesty-corruption,
charisma-unpersuasiveness). If elections became a little less
exciting, that might actually be a good thing.

Moreover, voters would hopefully become more generous about approving
candidates in the primary that they're not yet ready to vote for in
the general election, as a way of saying "hey, having Katie
McKrazypants in the general election debates ought to make things
interesting!  Let's vote for her!".  Over time, I suspect that
candidates would get good at positioning themselves as good
safe-to-fail experimental candidates.  Then the general election
becomes the safeguard where many of the same voters might then cast a
more critical vote.  Given that we'll have over seven months(!) to vet
the general election candidates, we should assume that some voters
will change their mind, and/or Katie McCrazypants would get thoroughly
vetted and found to be not-so-crazy after all.

A close candidate who gets 45% approval (e.g Cassie McCloseypants) but
doesn't get quite enough approval to advance to the general election
still sends a pretty strong signal.  It would seem that at least some
of the advancing general election candidates (e.g. Larissa
McLeftypants and Ronald McRightypants) would come to understand that
the 45% candidate (Cassie McCloseypants) was trying to advance some
issues that are worthy of further discussion during the general
election cycle.  Both general election candidates would be well
advised to seek out an endorsement from Cassie McCloseypants, and
would have plenty of time to broker for support from the Cassie
McCloseypants campaign (e.g. recruiting volunteers, getting email
lists, getting contact databases, etc)

Ted also wrote:

The tradeoff that we're up against: providing genuine choice for a
large part of the electorate vs properly culling the list of primary
contenders so as not to overwhelm voters with options.  Though I
suspect your intuition is correct about almost all candidates scoring
well under 50% in the first few elections, my fear is that you're
being too generous for the long-term.  The benefit of having a 50%
threshold for automatic advancement to the general election is that
it makes the barrier high enough that it becomes difficult for rabid
extremists to game the system.

What I fear: as the system becomes routine, sophisticated candidates
will learn to optimize their primary candidacies to achieve whatever
the minimum percentage required to guarantee them a spot on the
general election ballot.  50% is a respectable target.  33% is
horrifyingly low target.  With FPTP, we live in a world where each
party optimizes for 50.1% inclusion by estranging the other 49.9% that
aren't part of the tribe.  I shudder to think about what tactics would
emerge to optimize political tribes for 33.4% in/66.6% out.

Mind you, I'm still proposing we develop a small loophole for allowing
"marginally viable candidates" to advance, though only in service of
increasing overall ballot satisfaction.  It seems too large of a
loophole to allow every complementary candidate to the runners-up to
advance, doesn't it?  Granted, it does at least provide disincentive
for the dominant political party to flood the field with clones, but
it also seems like it would be possible for the complementary
candidates to be fringe, extremist candidates with very low approval
scores.  Perhaps the answer to that is to just set the floor for
"marginally viable" to be 40%, and then only advance marginally viable
candidates who increase the ballot satisfaction score.  We can also
still limit the number of marginally viable candidates who advance
(the "opposition candidate pool") by maintaining the rule that the
opposition candidate pool will be no larger than the majority
candidate pool.

I suspect that it would take a few years of usage before any
second-place candidate gets above 50% approval.  In fact, it may be
common for even the Approval Winner (AW) to get less than 50%.

With all this in mind, it may be worth reading Clay Shentrup's
responses to my blog post:
https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/i-challenge-this-858b5ab0a09a
https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/way-too-much-complexity-b4b2c8d6ee6e

In short, he's suggesting to just use the top two Approval winners.
That seems likely to motivate candidates of the dominant party to
unite as clones of one another, but maybe I'm missing something.
Still, the KISS principle of his proposal is appealing.

I think I'm pretty close to being able to write up draft 3 of MAF,
which should be simple enough.  What I have in mind now is basically:
"allow all candidates who (usually) get over 50% approval, and allow a
(usually) equal number of opposition candidates who get over 40%
approval".  The first "(usually)" acknowledges the possibility that
there may not be any candidate that gets over 50% approval, and the
second "(usually)" acknowledges that there might not be any candidates
who qualify as opposition candidates, or that the opposition
candidates may be outnumbered.

Rob

A new subreddit (within Reddit) has just been created to get approval
voting adopted in California primary elections:

r/ApprovalCalifornia

I strongly support the use of approval voting in U.S. primary elections.
The winner will never be from the wrong political party, so the
imperfections of approval voting are small compared to the huge
unfairnesses of plurality voting.

The top-two runoff method in California's general election takes care of
yielding a fair outcome in the general election (in spite of using
plurality voting).

The fact that only the wording on the ballots needs to change make this
a much easier reform.

The more people realize that there are other kinds of ballots, the
sooner the even better reforms can be adopted.

The method recommended in this thread is interesting, and might be even
better than standard approval voting.  When California starts using
approval ballots, hopefully the relevant vote counts will be shared to
allow this method to become either better validated, or not.

On 12/5/2018 1:40 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:> What I fear: as the system
becomes routine, sophisticated candidates

Reforms of how voting is done within a legislature can fix this
unfairness.  I created www.NegotiationTool.com to demonstrate how that
can be done.

Richard Fobes