I agreeto Idea Allow voters to vote for more than one presidential candidate.
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Allow voters to vote for more than one presidential candidate.

Why Is This Idea Important?: Third party candidates have the effect of harming the major party candidate they most agree with by drawing votes away from that candidate. This has affected the outcome of several recent presidential elections: Bush/Gore/Nader 2000, Clinton/Bush/Perot 1992. This causes voters to become cynical about the democratic process.

Approval voting[1] is a system where a voter may vote for as many candidates as he or she wishes.

As an example, suppose a voter likes a particular third party candidate, as well as a mainstream candidate. Should the voter "throw their vote away" on the candidate who isn't likely to win, or vote for the mainstream candidate? With approval voting, they could simply vote for both candidates.

The candidate with the most votes wins, as usual.

States could allocate their electoral votes to the winner, similar to the way we do things now, or with a constitutional amendment or the agreement of enough states, we could do a direct popular vote using the approval voting system.

I prefer approval voting to IRV and Condorcet voting because it's much easier to explain how a winner is determined, but any of those would be a vast improvement over the current system. Ranged voting is another reasonable alternative.

[1] href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

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Submitted by jsnow 4 years ago

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Comments (6)

  1. dunstvangeet

    The problem with Approval Voting is there's no real way to determine what the person does. Furthermore, it assumes equal support for the candinates voted for, and still doesn't get rid of the incentive for just voting for one candinate.

    Furthermore, it also violates the one-man, one-vote principal, and would be ruled unconstitutional. Why should someone's vote count twice as much just because they support more candinates?

    4 years ago
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  2. jerseydale

    Well with Acorn you can vote as many times as you want.

    4 years ago
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  3. jsnow Idea Submitter

    re: dunstvangeet

    "there's no real way to determine what the person does"

    I'm not following you.

    "Furthermore, it assumes equal support for the candinates voted for"

    Some people prefer IRV or Condorcet for that reason. However, approval voting does offer voters more flexibility than the current system, and is simpler to explain than IRV or Condorcet.

    If you prefer IRV, you can vote for it here:

    http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/dtd/5170-4049

    "Why should someone's vote count twice as much just because they support more candinates?"

    It isn't as if they can vote twice for one candidate. I think a good way of thinking about approval voting is that you're voting for or against each candidate in isolation from all others. The candidate who wins is the one who is tolerated by the most voters. If a voter only tolerates one candidate, that's fine. They're in effect voting against all the other candidates, so that voter has just as much influence as anyone else.

    4 years ago
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  4. dunstvangeet

    No, but ultimately, jsnow, their vote does count more.

    Let's say in the last election, I vote for 1 candidate: Candidate A. That's one vote.

    You vote for Candidate A and Candidate B. Your vote effectively counts as twice as much as mine, because you voted for 2 candidates, and I voted for one.

    Furthermore, ultimately, the fundamental problem is let's say that Candidate A is very popular, and has strong support among 80 percent of the population. He doesn't get elected because Candidate B is "Palatable" to 85% of the population (well, he's better than Candidate C, or whatever). Should that happen?

    It fundamentally violates the one-man, one-vote system.

    I'd much rather see an IRV for the general election, and then parties switching to a Condorcet system for the Primaries (with IRV for a unbreakable tie). And yes, I understand both systems well.

    IRV is you have one transferable vote, basically. If your candidate is the bottom, then you go to your next choice.

    Condorcet system is where you have a series of head-to-head matchups. The candidate who's ranked the lowest gets the vote. The candidate who wins the matchup gets a point. The candidate who has the most points wins the election. Of course, you have to deal with potential ties, usually by using Condorcet just with the tied candidate, followed by another system, such as IRV between the tied candidate.

    4 years ago
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  5. jsnow Idea Submitter

    "Furthermore, ultimately, the fundamental problem is let's say that Candidate A is very popular, and has strong support among 80 percent of the population. He doesn't get elected because Candidate B is "Palatable" to 85% of the population (well, he's better than Candidate C, or whatever). Should that happen?"

    I'm okay with that. Maybe it's not the best solution, but it's not a terrible outcome and one can come up with examples of counterintuitive results in any voting system. IRV, for instance, can fail the monotonicity criterion: a candidate can be harmed by increasing his/her ranking on a particular ballot. The likelihood of this happening in a real election is a matter of some debate, but is probably fairly rare.

    I think the biggest danger with approval voting is that someone who is wildly popular but doesn't have any particular qualifications for the job (say, Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford) could win simply by not expressing strong opinions on any topic. This is a problem with IRV and Condorcet as well, though perhaps to a lesser extent. In the end, though, for any voting system to work you have to trust the voters not to make dumb decisions.

    I fear that if I go on much longer about the strengths and weaknesses of individual voting systems I will detract from a more important point I would rather be making, which is that approval voting, IRV, and Condorcet would all be a vast improvement over our present system.

    4 years ago
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  6. Don Wood

    Jsnow,

    Here's the problem with your idea of, "Should the voter "throw their vote away" on the candidate who isn't likely to win, or vote for the mainstream candidate?"

    The most axiomatic thing is that it's fence straddling. People refused to vote for Ron Paul because they didn't think he could win against either the Republican candidate or whoever they thought the Democratic candidate would be. I had a lady very sincerely tell me I was wasting my vote while she rides around in a red convertible with a red, blue and white suit and scarf blowing in the wind. Actually, she was voting for "the lesser of two evils," McCain. She believed in Ron Paul's message but wouldn't vote for it for that reason. She's nothing more than a false patriot. She voted for EVIL and got it in spades.

    Actually, Obama is the right one because he's waking up those who can actually be awakened. He's running of with our country because we lost the Republic quite some time ago, and therefore he's able to do so.

    Remember, there are as many good sounding doctrines as there are minds to make them up. Ron Paul - Republican and Dennis Kucinich - Democrat BOTH wanted to RESTORE the Constitution. The people voted instead for good looks, the lesser of two evils, for color, for . . . . What ever! They didn't vote their consciouses. It's all for taking a stand and being sure that your stand is Constitutional.

    4 years ago
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