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New Hampshire Bill Could Lead To Adoption of Approval Voting
Okian Warrior writes "The people at FreeKeene report: 'Four Republican state representatives have sponsored a bill that would replace first-past-the-post voting with approval voting for all state offices and presidential primaries. Under this system, voters would select every candidate they approve of (regardless of party), and the candidate with the highest overall vote total wins. This reduces strategic voting, and would often make elections easier for moderate and libertarian candidates. The bill, HB240, will have a public hearing Tuesday, February 1st, with the House Election Law committee.'"
Nope. The thing is, this voting is more expressive than FPP. Allow me to use the infamous Gore/Bush/Nader choice to illustrate.
With FPP, assuming you like Nader best, Gore second best, and Bush worst. You can either vote for Nader, or vote for Gore. If you know/assume that Nader will not win, you vote for Gore, but if you assume that Nader could win, you vote for him.
Now suppose you bet Nader could win, and you're wrong. Since you had no way of also expressing your preference for Gore over Bush, your vote is now meaningless, except as information about Nader's level of support.
If on the other hand, you bet Nader couldn't win, and voted for Gore, then even though you bet correctly, there's still a loss -- now the information about third-party support is missing, because you couldn't express that in your vote. (This is one reason third-parties aren't successful -- not only the direct loss of votes due to stategic voting, but the lack of information on real support among real voters means third parties can't build momentum, can't assess their numbers and effectively form a coalition behind a single candidate, etc.)
Range voting or Score voting (two names for the same thing) is the most expressive possible -- you assign a score on a discrete or continuous scale from 0 to 1 (or 0 to 10, 0 to 100, etc. -- same thing in principle) to each candidate, each candidate's total is summed, and the candidate with the highest aggregate score wins. (Or for multi-winner elections, the top n candidates win). You can express your degree of support for each candidate precisely, and the totals will show it. Also, there'll be no races like 1980, when a third-party _should_ have won (i.e. the majority of voters preferred Anderson to both main-party candidates, but couldn't express that preference without risking a win by their least-preferred candidate), though those do seem to be fairly rare. (Of course, since a more expressive system lets third parties know where they stand and form effective coalitions, they'll become more common, and candidates will become less "not-the-other-team" (for main parties) or single-issue (for third parties) and more representative of the people's actual will.)
Approval voting is a simple variant of range voting where the range is discretized all the way to one bit -- a simple yes/no on each candidate. This does cause a loss of expressiveness, but it's still way more expressive than the existing system, and better than most alternative systems. In fact, it's nearly equivalent to range voting in practice, because the best strategy for range voting (yes, basically all voting systems have a strategy better than absolute honesty, and range voting is no exception) is to exaggerate preferences (better than FPP, where the best strategy is usually to lie about preferences between a major party and a minor party) by listing all candidates in order of preference, pick a dividing line based on expectations of how the rest of the voters will vote, and give maximum score to all candidates above and minimum to all voters below. Of course, approval voting forces the scores to the limit for you, by removing all intermediate values, making the best strategy only a matter of where you draw the line in your honestly ordered list.
To answer your specific scenario:
Yeah, if most voters on both sides are willing to choose the same third party over the "other team", and it's as you say "a toss-up between the two big parties" (i.e. no consensus in the populace between them), most sane people with their heads out of their asses would say having that third party win is the best outcome. Now if everyone's choosing all third parties over the other team, then they're drawing their approval line way too low, and failing at strategic voting. They'll probably learn from that, and be a little more circumspect about which third party they support in the next election -- getting a fairer result.
Honestly, your complai