Approval voting

The election by consent (English Approval Voting ) is a selection method in which the voter has the opportunity to vote for any number of candidates. He chooses as no longer the top candidate preference, but all those who appear to him acceptable. The candidate with the most votes received wins the election.

Features

With the ability to select only one candidate can win the electoral arithmetic of the most polarizing candidate, while in the choice wins by consent rather the most popular candidate. It was found in a French study that in the presidential election in France in 2002, when in the first round election would have been by consent of the mode, come most likely to be a runoff election between the conservative incumbent Jacques Chirac and the Socialist Lionel Jospin would be instead of the actual runoff between Jacques Chirac and the far-right Jean -Marie Le Pen, as Jospin would have received significantly more support among the people as Le Pen

The election by consent is a simplified form of assessment choice in which only the scores 0 and 1 are possible.

Variants

With the simple choice by agreeing with only one cross the missing cross is mathematically always a rejection ( " negative vote" ). It is the voters in this variant is not possible to express his abstention for a particular candidate. Only with an invalid ballots you can include all the candidates together.

Election by agreement with abstention

Technical design

To allow abstention per candidate, you have two ( purely technical ) designs for the ballot:

• It provides a "yes" - ( for approval) and a "No " field ( for rejection ) of
• It provides a "yes", "no" - and one abstention field.

In the variant without abstention box you need to put no cross on the candidate to express his abstention. In the variant with abstention box the voter is clear that he has a possibility of abstention and the subsequent manipulation of the ballot more difficult.

Differences for election by consent without abstention

Consent election with abstention has some advantages:

• With a large amount of candidates who are the voters not completely known, the missing information must not lead to individual candidates to a rejection. The voter can therefore specify his knowledge of the candidates in more detail.
• With the abstention vote results in the ability to recognize a simple majority (more support than rejection ). The election by consent without abstention, however, can only detect an absolute majority (more approval than other votes).
• It is possible in one or a few rounds of voting to choose a fixed number of candidates, when ( to account for the abstentions) selects consequently the simple majority.

An election by agreement with abstention representing an abstract of n ballots into a ballot, where n is the number of candidates.

This also results in a disadvantage of this method:

• The effort the count is higher than in a consent election without abstention when a large number of candidates.
• Election by agreement with abstention is not suitable to determine ranking, if you have a large number of candidates.

Application

The selection mode is used in some scientific institutions as well as in the choice of the United Nations Secretary-General. In the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries, a similar system was in the second half of the 1980s used in internal party elections, but not ticked in the name of the candidate, but could be ruled out. So the voters expressed like his rejection of a candidate. However Logically, both systems are equivalent.

In Germany, the choice is used by permission of the Pirate Party candidates in elections. The choice is used by permission partially within the Pirate Party in the preliminary round of vote of applications when multiple applications are competing for a vote. The election by agreement with abstention was first performed at the installation meeting of the Pirate Party in Lower Saxony Wolfenbüttel. From 68 applicants were able to 30 candidates will be elected in four hours and a ballot.

Tactics

There are obvious ways to tactically choose:

If the voter has no information on the likely election result makes sense to choose the better than average perceived candidates. If a race between two candidates is emerging and the voters would choose the lesser evil in the system of simple majority, the optimal tactics, these also choose the Approval Voting and to all who are against the compromise candidate preferred.

Nevertheless, Approval Voting is more resistant tactics. Suppose the choice runs anonymously and without revealing any of the intermediate results, while still selected. Assuming further that a voter wants to optimize only the direct election result and has no long-term tactic, then the voter has no reason to make a compromise candidate over his favorites. Repeated -shows the same candidate in the course of several elections, the tactics, a compromise candidate and above Preferred result to tick, even in a more accurate representation of the will of the majority.