Could Approval Voting Prevent Electoral Disaster? | Steven Brams | Big Think

Could Approval Voting Prevent Electoral Disaster?

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One of the originators of “approval voting” explains how his model would prevent the kind of foregone-conclusion elections that discourage voters from participating.

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Steven Brams:

Steven Brams is a Professor of Politics at New York University. He graduated in 1962 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. in 1966 from Northwestern. His primary research interests include game theory and its applications, particularly in political science and international relations, and social choice theory, particularly as applied to voting and elections. He is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting and a co-discoverer of the first envy-free solution to the n-person cake cutting problem. Brams was a Guggenheim Fellow from 1986 to 1987 and is a member of the American Association for Advancement of Science.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is approval voting, and how is it currently used?

Steven Brams: Approval voting is a voting system for multi-candidate races. Races with more then two candidates, which are typical in, say, Presidential Primaries with five to 10 major candidates starting off in Iowa and New Hampshire. In those kinds of races, approval voting would permit you to vote for, or approve of, as many candidates as you’d like. So, if there were nine candidates in the race, the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in 2008, and you were a liberal Democrat and you had identified three people as liberal in the Democrat party, then you wouldn’t have to make an arbitrary choice in one of the liberals. You could vote for all three and thereby better express your preferences. So, you can do everything you can under the present system, vote for one candidate if you have a clear favorite. But if you don’t have a clear favorite, if you’re relatively indifferent among several candidates, like the liberal democrats, you can vote for all of those. Or, if you despise someone you can vote for everybody else.

So, it gives you great flexibility in being able to express your differences. It’s on a ranking system. Each person that you approve of gets one vote, and the person with the most approval wins the election. And we’ve shown that it would have had major consequences in a race like the 2000 Presidential election. Presumably, many Nader supporters would have also voted for Gore to prevent their worse choice, Bush, from winning. So, they would have cast two approval votes. Some would have bullet voted, we say, voted exclusively for Nader and Gore would have, of course, his exclusive supporters. But it’s quite clear that a sufficient number of Nader supporters would have also approved of Gore such that he almost surely would have won the election in Florida or in the Presidential elections. So, it would have obviously made a difference in that election. And there are many other examples with significant third or fourth party candidates in which the outcome almost surely would have changed.

We can’t surely quite ascertain that it would have changed in the end because when you change the rules, any change in the rules by allowing approval voting, the nature of the campaign would change and we can’t simply extrapolate from the present campaign. But I think there’s good enough information in the 2000 election to say that under approval voting Gore almost surely would have won.

So, besides giving the voter more flexible options, it tends to elect the strongest candidate overall. Not the strongest minority candidate. And we have examples where significant candidates on the left or the right, have beat out a centrist candidate, a centrist is hit from both sides so to speak by the left and right candidates in a three-candidate race, and comes in third, let’s say. So, even if there’s a run off, which is something proposed as a solution and used as a solution to try to find the strongest candidate, the runoff would put the left candidate against the right when it’s pretty clear the centrist candidate in a pair wise contest against the left candidate would beat the left candidate, a pair wise contest against the right candidate would beat the right candidate. So could beat each of his competitors in a compare wise contest. We actually have a name for that candidate in these multi-candidate races. He’s a Condorset candidate, after the Marquise de Condorset in the late 18th century France, who proposed this kind of candidate and showed that one always doesn’t find such a candidate.

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