User:R.H.

Approval Random

The ballot

Every voter marks one candidate as "favoured" and any number of candidates as "also accepted". Those marks are added together and counted as "approved". If no candidate gets more than 50% approval, the ballots are used in a lottery to determine the winner. Otherwise the one with most approval wins.

Reasoning

Assumption 1: While random elements are a solid way to make elections less vulnerable to cheating, they are too radical for many voters.

It follows that an election method that uses randomness should have that feature not as a first step, but only as a fallback and every voter should have some control over whether that happens.

Assumption 2: If an approval voting election is hold and none of the approved candidates of a voter wins, s/he would prefer to have the election result discarded and a random ballot election instead.

It follows that if no candidate in an approval voting process gets approval by more than half the voters, the majority of the voters is in favour of a random ballot election (it can happen that the result of that is even more disliked, though).

Criteria passed and failed

Approval and Random Ballot pass FBC, so it is no surprise that this combined method does, too. Normal Approval gives people with a preference for a candidate known as weakly supported a reason to approve several candidates and people with a preference for a candidate known as strongly supported a reason to not approve anybody else. That's a bit unfair. This method adds some incentive for people with a preference for a candidate known as weakly supported to not approve anybody else (the lottery chance) and for people who prefer a candidate known as strongly supported a little incentive to also approve somebody else (to prevent the possibility of a lottery win for extremists).

Approval Random does not satisfy the Majority Criterion. It is not impossible that a candidate with 60% "favoured" votes loses to a candidate with no first votes but 61% "also approved" votes. It is also not impossible that a candidate with 1% "favoured" votes wins to a candidate with 49% "favoured" votes.