Welcome back to another episode of Liberty Revealed, the show dedicated to revealing personal liberty to all who listen. I am your host, Mike Mahony, and today I want to talk to you about approval voting and why I believe it will lead to better representation for the United States.

I am certain you are wondering what approval voting is. It is a single-winner electoral system where each voter may select ("approve") any number of candidates. The winner is the most-approved candidate.

Robert J. Weber coined the term "Approval Voting" in 1971. Guy Ottewell described the system in 1977. It was more fully published in 1978 by political scientist Steven Brams and mathematician Peter Fishburn.

Approval voting ballots look like the ballots we are currently used to. They have a list of the candidates running for that seat for each office being contested. Next to each name is a way to select that candidate.

Each candidate is essentially treated as a separate question: “Do you approve of this person for this job?” Approval voting allows the voter to indicate their support for one, some, or all candidates. Every vote counts equally and all voters get the same number of votes: one per candidate. The winner is the candidate supported by most voters.

If a voter happens to mark every candidate the same it will have no effect on the outcome of the election. It is a wash. Each candidate approved is considered preferred to any candidate not approved, while the voter’s preference for their approved candidates is not specified. 

Approval voting can be considered a form of range voting, with the range restricted to two values, 0 and 1—or a form of majority judgment, with grades restricted to good and poor. Approval Voting can also be compared to plurality voting, without the rule that discards ballots that vote for more than one candidate.

Approval voting has already been put to the test in various places.

Approval voting has been used in privately administered nomination contests by the Independent Party of Oregon in 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Oregon is a fusion voting state, and the party has cross-nominated legislators and statewide officeholders using this method; its 2016 presidential preference primary did not identify a potential nominee due to no candidate earning more than 32% support. It is also used in internal elections by the American Solidarity Party, the Green Parties of Texas and Ohio, the Libertarian parties of Texas and Colorado,[ the US Modern Whig party, and the German Pirate Party.

In 2018, Fargo, North Dakota passed a ballot initiative adopting approval voting for local elections, becoming the first United States city and jurisdiction to adopt approval voting.

Approval voting advocates Steven Brams and Dudley R. Herschbach predict that approval voting should increase voter participation, prevent minor-party candidates from being spoilers, and reduce negative campaigning. The effect of this system as an electoral reform measure is not without naysayers, however. FairVote has a position paper arguing that approval voting has three flaws that undercut it as a method of voting and political vehicle. They argue that it can result in the defeat of a candidate who would win an absolute majority in a plurality election, can allow a candidate to win who might not win any support in a plurality election, and has incentives for tactical voting. The first two "flaws" are considered advantages by advocates of approval voting, as it chooses centrist candidates with broad appeal rather than polarizing candidates who appeal only to the majority. Supporters also point out that any voting method is subject to strategic voting with more than two candidates, as pointed out in Gibbard's theorem.

One study showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) – it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin as the top two to proceed to a runoff. Le Pen lost by a very high margin in the runoff, 82.2% to 17.8%, a sign that the true top two had not been found. Straight approval voting without a runoff, from the study, still would have selected Chirac, but with an approval percentage of only 36.7%, compared to Jospin at 32.9%. Le Pen, in that study, would have received 25.1%. In the real primary election, the top three were Chirac, 19.9%, Le Pen, 16.9%, and Jospin, 16.2%. A study of various "evaluative voting" methods (approval voting and score voting) during the French presidential election, 2012 showed that "unifying" candidates tended to do better, and polarizing candidates did worse, via the evaluative voting methods than via the plurality system.

A generalized version of the Burr dilemma applies to approval voting when two candidates are appealing to the same subset of voters. Although approval voting differs from the voting system used in the Burr dilemma, approval voting can still leave candidates and voters with the generalized dilemma of whether to compete or cooperate.

While in the modern era there have been relatively few competitive approval voting elections where tactical voting is more likely, Brams argues that approval voting usually elects Condorcet winners in practice.[55] Critics of the use of approval voting in the alumni elections for the Dartmouth Board of Trustees in 2009 placed its ultimately successful repeal before alumni voters, arguing that the system has not been electing the most centrist candidates. The Dartmouth editorialized that "When the alumni electorate fails to take advantage of the approval voting process, the three required Alumni Council candidates tend to split the majority vote, giving petition candidates an advantage. By reducing the number of Alumni Council candidates, and instituting a more traditional one-person, one-vote system, trustee elections will become more democratic and will more accurately reflect the desires of our alumni base."

The approval voting method seems to me to avoid poor choices by voters. The research I’ve done indicates that it would be an extremely fair and equitable manner in which to elect our representatives. Of course, this is predicated on voters doing the right thing and actually voting for all candidates they approve of. As an example of what could happen, I looked at my own past election experience. Because there were 3 candidates in my race and the voters had to choose just 1 candidate, I was at a disadvantage as a candidate running in a third party. The victor got 65,000 votes, the second place got 30,000 votes and I got 16,000 votes. We know that 16,000 people approved of me, but what if the 65,000 who voted for the winner also approved of me? I would have won the election! 

This is the easiest way to make sure that everyone has an equal chance at winning if they are qualified. It is a simple change. Unlike Ranked Choice Voting, which requires a complete change to the ballot and massive voter education efforts, approval voting (as I mentioned) uses the same type of ballot. The main difference is voters can vote for as many candidates as they’d like. 

Tell me your thoughts on this by leaving a voicemail on the Yogi’s Podcast Network hotline at (657) 529-2218.

That’s it for this episode of Liberty Revealed. .If you like what you’ve heard, please rate us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Google Play. If you’d like to learn more about personal liberty, grab your free copy of my book “Liberty Revealed” by heading over to http://yogispodcastnetwork.com/libertyrevealed. Until next time...stay free!