Editorial by Daniel Lutz
I waste my vote. Every election cycle, every ballot, I will inevitably waste my vote. I do not intend to waste my vote. I would like to think that my vote matters a great deal, whether it be on a ballot issue or for a Judge or a Representative to a legislative body. A vote should matter, every vote should mean something. In American culture today, most everyone knows what a wasted vote is. No sensible person wants to waste their vote. People fought and died for our right to do this. One of the most insulting things we can do is waste our vote. The cornerstone of western democracies is the will of the people represented by their vote. In the long history of democracies people have always tried to intimidate the voter, to ensure the vote. In order to protect against this, we, as other democracies have, kept the confidence of the vote by allowing anonymity, but that does not free us to vote our conscience, to vote the candidate we deem best. Only two candidates stand a chance of winning, right? So, what is the use of voting for the candidate you believe in? You should pick one that can win. The candidate can win, but we the people continue to lose, we lose our freedoms, we lose our money, we lose the American dream. When the colonies stood against the might of the monarchy, I doubt they were considering who had the best chance of winning. They were going to stand for what they thought was right, win lose or draw. Politics draws up deep emotions and beliefs from all peoples, but we cannot let these passions override our better judgment. Violence is not the answer to political discourse and disagreement. Voting at the ballot box is the best way to express your dissent with the system or a politician. If you want to send a message to your elected officials do so by bravely voting for who you believe is best equipped for the job. If we all started voting with more honesty, we could have a more honest system. I waste my vote, I am told, when I do not vote for whoever the two main parties put forward. As long as the candidates we are offered continue to be ones that we don’t want or don’t truly support, as long as they continue to waste our elections, I will continue to waste my vote. What I want to know is, who is willing to vote for who they believe in, who is brave enough to waste their vote with me?
I’m not going to weigh in one way or another, I am enjoyong how these ideas are being worked with and debated and I just wanted to say thank you to all the commentors for reading and commenting.
One more point about approval voting: it doesn’t require any redesign or reformatting of any ballot. The current ballots that we use for plurality voting are just fine; all you need to do is allow overvotes to be counted.
I’ll go you one better… in MOST races one of the nominees of the two dominant parties has no chance, either. SO… is it a wasted vote to vote for Trump-Vance electors in California? It sure as hell is if by wasted vote you mean voting for someone who cannot win.
Approval Voting minimizes both wasted votes and spoilers; and moves us beyond two party thinking. Approval Voting is: vote for one vote for some vote for all but one. When friends want to stay friends and are deciding on a movie or restaurant they use show of hands; Approval Voting is show of hands with paper ballots. The candidate with the most votes wins!
As a practical matter, the University faculty from which I have since retired tried approval voting for a bit. It soon turned into THE BULLET BALLOT. Most people only voted for one candidate.
Yes, I have anticipated that such is the usual outcome with approval voting. Nevertheless, it is still an improvement over plurality voting; in a close race, the approval voter can be decisive.
It’s true that with approval voting, the voter who casts more than one vote tends to dilute his own vote. So, it’s not surprising that the partisan voter will bullet vote.
I have lived in places where the multi-member local councils are elected at large. I have tended to cast less than a full number of allowed votes (sometimes only one) to improve the chances of preferred candidates. This is the same sort of strategy that I would probably use with approval voting. It’s not necessarily bad; it’s a voter’s legitimate choice.
And, one underappreciated virtue of approval voting is that it allows a less partisan voter, who has partisan relatives, friends or co-workers on both sides of a partisan divide, to avoid stress by casing approval votes for candidates across the political spectrum. Some may view that as cowardly, but, sometimes a less partisan voter can see complimentary virtues in opposing candidates.
I have thought that one of the improvements that could be made to the Electoral College would be to allow electors to vote for more than one candidate for President. (ie Elector approval voting) Of, course, most would probably cast only one vote for the reasons already mentioned in this discussion. But, in a close election, or one in which a candidate’s fitness or qualifications to be President is questionable, electors would have a fallback choice.
The simplest improvement for the Electoral College is to go to the Nebraska/Main system nationwide.
The great improvement would be to implement it at a state level, where each county gets an Elector to decide statewide offices like Governor etc.
That, and have counties appoint state Senators instead of popular elections.
Approval voting seems like it ought to be used when voters are choosing among several options of equal quality. Example: From this list, what times are you available for a meeting?
There are qualitative differences between candidates for office. In what ways is approval voting better for that than score voting? Perhaps in the very unusual case mentioned by Walter Ziobro of saving a relative of a candidate the embarrassment of having to admit that they gave someone other than their relative a higher score, but other than that, what benefits does approval voting have over score voting?
Well, in addition to the case you mention, it allows a voter whose ideology doesn’t match either major party to cast votes that more perfectly represent that voter’s ideology. Say. a Libertarian voter does not like the Democrats’ high tax policies, but also doesn’t like Republicans high tariff, anti trade policies (I’m one of those, BTW). That voter could cast an approval vote for each of them as a check on the other. That might appear to cancel that voter’s OWN vote, but in the sum, it expresses a nuanced disapproval of both candidates. That’s actually how to cast a DISAPPROVAL vote in approval voting, if no disapproval option is available.
Score voting is approval voting with an additional scoring feature. Thus, it’s more involved. It seems doubtful to me that the additional nuance that a very politically involved person, such as a commenter at a niche political news website, would like to have does anything but make things seem overcomplicated to the average voter. Note that GOP hacks and grifters will attack any change so if a reform is sought it ought to be as simple and straightforward as possible. Perhaps in places where approval voting is enacted after it becomes established then score voting could be pursued as an additional improvement.
The simplest reforms are:
1. Run-off voting in which no candidate gets 50% (Several states already have this for some offices)
2. Approval voting, because it doesn’t require a complicated redesign of the ballot, as ranked choice, cumulative, or score voting do. All that is needed to have approval voting is to allow overvotes to be counted. People who want to can still vote the old-fashion way (one vote per office), and won’t even notice any difference in their ballot.
The “overly complicated” argument just means you think voters are too stupid to understand that a “5” means they like a candidate a lot, a “0” means they don’t like a candidate at all, and a “3” means something in between.
Many voters are dumb, but I have yet to meet one who is THAT dumb.
Switching to approval first would make a switch to score less likely. It would create confusion if the method of voting is switched too frequently. It is easy to do a PSA on a new voting method once. Doing it in consecutive elections, or every other election, would create confusion. It would also create exhaustion with the idea of switching and make voters think the people who pushed approval initially really did not know what they were doing, so they would be less likely to trust a new push to switch.
You should spend more time interacting with large numbered random cross sections of voters. It’s not that they are incapable of understanding such things, although yes, some are. It’s that the amount of mental energy or priority they are willing to devote to doing so is far less than you might imagine. This makes them easier to manipulate (as well as creating greater opportunity for vote counting related fraud and error) with any of these schemes such as ranked choice, approval, score, range etc voting and everything else discussed in this article comment section.
I’ve seen one voting reform proposal actually worth anything discussed ever, and only in the comments at Ballot access news: the “Max” plan which involves on the record standing count voting by party with all voters present on election night at the voting hall.
When you think about it, approval voting has a hidden “score” feature. If you have strong preference for one or two candidates, you just cast only one or two votes; no more than that, even if there are more options, as that will dilute your vote. The voter who is more indifferent will likely cast more approval votes, and thereby dilute their own votes.
Even score voting can be similarly strategized by a partisan voter. If a voter has a strong preference for one candidate, that voter can give that candidate a 5, and 0 to all the others, effectively casting a “bullet” score vote.