Thread by @bramcohen

There's a loud internet movement for approval voting. Approval voting is a bad idea, as I'll now explain (thread)

For those who don't know, approval voting is where voters say yes or no to all the candidates and whichever candidate gets the most yes votes wins. This is in contrast to ranked ballots, where everybody gives rankings of how much they like the candidates from best to worst

Let's consider how this works out in practice. In the most common case there are two leading candidates and then a bunch of others who aren't in contention.

If you're voting in such an election you obviously say yes to the one of the leading candidates you prefer and no to the other. Approval voting advocates respond to this by saying such behavior is unethical. This is profoundly wrong on several levels

First of all, you don't get to call your users unethical. That's even worse than programmers saying their users are stupid because they can't figure out horrible UX. This is people making a bad UX and calling the users unethical for figuring it out.

Second we have this principle of one person one vote. We don't give foaming at the partisans two votes or largely apathetic people half a vote. Everybody gets one vote. This is partially in the interest of inclusion, partially to avoid histrionics, and \

partially to prevent the inevitable abuse whenever there's a system of deciding who gets to vote which has any discretion whatsoever. Letting people who understand the voting system better make their vote count violates one of the basic principles of democracy.

We also don't deny the vote to people who think they're voting for the lesser of two evils or choosing the better of two candidates.

Now let's move on to the next most common case, where there are three leading candidates. Obviously you'll say you approve of the one you like the most and disapprove of the one you like the least, but what about the one in he middle?

That one is pure gamesmanship, with no rational basis for making a decision other than which of the two sub-races you can now cast a vote in is more likely to be decisive. Call me crazy, but making voters feel they have to study in order to vote is horrible UX

Which leads to the next question: Isn't approval voting easier to understand than ranked ballots? Given that approval voting advocates think voters won't figure out the gaming explained above, they're at least being consistent with this point of thinking voters are really stupid.

Well when you have a ranked choice ballot laid out as a grid reading it in one direction it looks like you said you prefer Karen third and reading it in the other direction it says you're third most preferred candidate is Karen. That... isn't confusing at all.

To be fair there is a kernel of truth in the common approval voting advocate criticism of instant runoff. Instant runoff isn't a good algorithm, it's much better to make the winner be whoever would win every 2-way race, but that's still ranked ballots

Also there needs to be some process to determine who leading candidates are to cull the list of them down to a number people can reasonably research before voting. That tends to have a bit more of an approval flavor, but the final round is much better done as ranked ballots