Talk:Ballot

Bloc cumulative approval

[Two thoughts]:

I don't think bloc voting and cumulative voting are forms of single-mark.
I'm not sure approval thresholds should be so prominent, as they aren't very commonly proposed.

— Psephomancy (talk) 05:16, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

For Bloc voting, I just want to mention to readers that a common generalization of single-mark is simply "mark up to N candidates" with N being number of seats. Maybe we can make it a separate ballot type and mention the connection. For cumulative voting, I think that is a generalization of the idea of single-mark; you are allowed to have up to a single mark, but that mark can be distributed among several candidates (in terms of vote power). I suppose it is not the same in terms of how you mark your ballot, so we can make it a separate category, but I want the reader to have that understanding that single-mark and cumulative are usually interchangeable, since I see cumulative as being the idealized form of many single-mark methods (i.e. when discussing vote management, a party trying to split its 9 votes to take 2 seats will put 4.5 votes per seat; this is not possible with single-mark, but with a cumulative ballot, voters can do this). Regarding approval thresholds, I don't think that it is taking up that much space, and it is crucial to help explain to readers what ballot types collect the most information (i.e. a rated ballot with an approval threshold is a ballot type which gives you the information contained in any other possible ballot type), so I'd like to discuss that further with you. Basically, I think it's a good idea to let readers know that approval thresholds offer a big connection between ranked, rated, and approval ballots, even if they're not really in use, because it helps increase readers' comprehension of how all of this preference information is related. For example, it implicitly helps people realize that when you approve a given candidate, it is rational to approve anyone you prefer more than or equal to that candidate, and thus also shows that approval ballots give you a way to get some information about the voter's ranked preferences. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 05:48, 4 April 2020 (UTC)