Approval voting: Difference between revisions

One of the major implications of Approval voting in relation to [[Choose-one FPTP voting|choose-one FPTP voting]] is that with Approval, there is no way to tell (solely with the vote totals for each candidate) whether a voter who supported one candidate did or didn't support another. For example, in FPTP (assuming no equal ranking was allowed, a la [[Cumulative voting|cumulative voting]]), if Obama gets 30 votes and Romney gets 20, then it is guaranteed that none of the 30 voters who supported Obama also supported Romney, and vice versa. But with Approval, it is possible (albeit unlikely in this example) that everyone who voted for Romney also voted for Obama, and that Obama really only has 10 voters who support him but not Romney. This means that proportional forms of Approval voting are not as precinct-summable as the proportional form of FPTP, [[SNTV]], because not only must one know how many voters approved each candidate to calculate the winner(s) in Approval PR methods, but also which candidates each ballot approved. With choose-one ballots, knowledge of the former yields knowledge of the latter.▼