Approval Voting - Other Issues and Comparisons

Other Issues and Comparisons

• Approval voting can allow voters to cast a compromise vote without abandoning their favorite candidate as long as voters accept the potential of that compromise vote resulting in the defeat of their favorite. Plurality voting can lead to voters abandoning their first choice in order to help a "lesser of evils" to win.
• Counting ballots in approval vote is faster than some other alternative voting methods, such as ordinal systems, and can be completed at the local level.
• If voters are sincere, approval voting would elect centrists at least as often as moderates of each extreme. If backers of relatively extreme candidates are insincere and "bullet vote" for that first choice, they can help that candidate defeat a compromise candidate who would have won if every voter had cast sincere preferences.
• If voters are sincere, candidates trying to win an approval voting election might need to get as much as 100% approval to beat a strong competitor, and would have to find solutions that are fair to everyone in order to do so, whereas a candidate may win a plurality race by promising many perks to a simple majority or even a plurality of voters at the expense of the smaller voting groups.
• Approval voting fails the majority criterion, because it is possible that the candidate most preferred by the majority of voters, for example, winning 60% in a plurality election, will lose, if 65% indicate another candidate is at least acceptable to them. If 40% strongly dislike candidate A but like candidate B, and 60% mildly prefer candidate A over candidate B, approval voting might elect candidate B, whereas plurality would elect candidate A in a two candidate race.
• Suppose a candidate is eliminated (say, for medical reasons) between a primary election and the party convention. With plurality voting, anyone who voted for that candidate effectively lost their franchise. Approval voting automatically shows their preference among the remaining candidates.
• Approval voting without write-ins is easily reversed as disapproval voting where a choice is disavowed, as is already required in other measures in politics (e.g. representative recall).
• Approval voting makes it much easier for voters to vote against a candidate by voting for several others instead of just one other, increasing the probability that some other candidate will win and thus that the first will not.
• In contentious elections with large groups of organized voters who prefer their favorite candidate vastly over all others, approval voting may revert to plurality voting. Some voters will support only their single favored candidate when they perceive the other candidates more as competitors to their preferred candidate than as compromise choices. Range voting and Majority Judgment allow these voters to give intermediate approval ratings, but at the cost of added ballot complexity and longer ballot counts.