ncase / ballot

An interactive guide to alternative voting systems
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
218 stars 41 forks source link

Glitch with Approval Voting model #16

Open gname23 opened 6 years ago

gname23 commented 6 years ago

My understanding of Approval Voting is that it would mirror FPTP in some situations, in the sense that a voter would vote for their most preferred candidate (as with FPTP) PLUS any additional candidates that fall within their personal approval threshold.

Your Approval Voting model, however, only has voters approving candidates within their approval threshold. If no candidates fall within that threshold, voters in your model cast no ballot, instead of just voting for their most preferred/nearest candidate (even if that candidate falls outside of the voter's approval threshold) as they would in FPTP. In other words, in a real-world application of Approval Voting, a voter would more likely bullet vote for a single candidate than not vote for any candidate at all.

Clearly, this issue gets to questions of individual voter strategy in an approval voting system. But making it so easy for voters to cast no ballot whatsoever seems to be an error in your sandbox model. Is it an easily correctable one?

Otherwise, this is a fantastic and incredibly useful tool -- thank you!