Negative vote
Negative vote, also called Balanced Plurality Voting (BPV) is a modification of FPTP, in which voters can choose to either support a single candidate, or vote against a single candidate. The negative votes are subtracted from positive votes for each candidate, and the candidate with the highest total is the winner.
It was originally proposed by George A.W. Boehm in 1976 in an essay[1] sent to various social choice theorists, which referenced the plot of the 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing, in which a candidate wins the US presidency despite being a bumbling crook,[2][3]:187 proposing that voters be given the option to vote against a candidate like Wintergreen rather than for someone else.
Steven Brams was initially interested in negative voting, and analyzed it for three-candidate elections,[4] but soon learned of approval voting from Robert Weber, compared the two systems,[5][6] and started advocating approval voting instead.[7]:xv
Notes
The common argument Negative vote advocates make is that in a two-faction election, partisans of both sides will "cancel each other out" by putting positive votes on their own side's candidates and negative votes on the other side's candidates, allowing candidates "in the middle" to win with some votes from centrist voters and no opposition from the partisans, who will be more focused on stopping the other side.
Cardinal method advocates tend to argue that negative vote still preserves most of the worst features of FPTP, in that it doesn't allow a voter to support multiple candidates, and can still incentivize Favorite Betrayal.
References
- ↑ Boehm, George A. W. (1976), One Fervent Vote against Wintergreen (Unpublished mimeograph)
- ↑ "About". Negative Vote. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
- ↑ Poundstone, William (2009-02-17). Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-8090-4892-2.
- ↑ Brams, Steven J. (1977), Henn, Rudolf; Moeschlin, Otto (eds.), "When is it Advantageous to Cast a Negative Vote?", Mathematical Economics and Game Theory, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 141, pp. 564–572, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-45494-3_45, ISBN 978-3-540-08063-3, retrieved 2020-04-19
- ↑ Brams, Steven (1976). "One Man, n Votes, Module in Applied Mathematics". Mathematical Association of America, Ithaca: Cornell University.
- ↑ Brams, Steven J. (1983), "Comparison Voting", Political and Related Models, Springer New York, pp. 32–65, doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-5430-0_3, ISBN 978-1-4612-5432-4, retrieved 2020-04-19
- ↑ Brams, Steven J.; Fishburn, Peter C. (2007). Approval voting (2nd ed ed.). New York: Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-49895-9. OCLC 96045998.CS1 maint: extra text (link)