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Last active November 22, 2017 22:27
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ApprovalVotingForPresident.com

What is Approval Voting?

This is how we do it now:

Plurality voting as Radio box example

This is how we could be doing it:

Approval voting as Checkbox example

Why is this better?

Less susceptible to extreme candidates exploiting First Past the Post voting paradoxes.

Consider these simulations that illustrate how Plurality Voting systematically bias us into two extreme candidates.

Helps smaller parties demonstrate support.

This creates more choices in political platforms for citizens!

America is all about freedom of choice, right? Well if we want to claim the title of strongest democracy, we need to earn it!

Removes the need to have party primaries at all.

It gets us away from "lesser of two evils" thinking. We could support a lot more candidates in our Presidential Elections, instead of limiting it to only 2 front-runners.

What about Instant Runoff Voting? (aka "ranked choice voting")

Ranked choice voting is an improvement over "just pick one" (plurality voting).

But there are still a few reasons to prefer Approval Voting:

1. Approval Voting leaves more people happy.

This can be objectively measured as lower Bayesian regret.

2. IRV can't be run decentralized.

It's much more complex to run Instant-Runoff Voting in a decentralized way, as we do now with individual voting precents.

3. Approval Voting is simpler for voters

You can maintain basically the same ballot. The only change from how we do it now is instructing "pick all who apply" instead of "just pick one".

What about range voting?

via RangeVoting.org

Range Voting is even better than Approval Voting!

It takes into account more information about which candidates are liked/disliked.

It can still be run entirely decentralized.

The only downsides: it's a little bit more complicated, ballots needs to change to add the numbers 0 - 9.

If you know all voters will understand the rules, Range Voting is an even better option than Approval Voting!

(Approval Voting is just a simplified version of Range Voting, where your only options are 0 vs 1.)

What about the Electoral College?

I don't want to get into this.

There are good reasons both to remove and support the EC system.

But in either case we could use Approval Voting: with the Electoral College, or for a National Popular Vote.

Either way, Approval Voting would improve things for nearly everyone.

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