Approval voting

In 2018, Fargo, North Dakota, passed a local ballot initiative adopting approval voting for the city's local elections, and it was used to elect officials in June 2020, becoming the first United States city and jurisdiction to adopt approval voting.[1][2][3]

In November 2020, St. Louis, Missouri passed Proposition D to authorize a variant of approval voting (as unified primary) for municipal offices.[4][5][6]

Robert J. Weber coined the term "approval voting" in 1971.[7] It was more fully published in 1978 by political scientist Steven Brams and mathematician Peter Fishburn.[8] Historically, several voting methods that incorporate aspects of approval voting have been used:

• Approval voting was used for papal conclaves between 1294 and 1621, with an average of about forty cardinals engaging in repeated rounds of voting until one candidate was listed on at least two-thirds of ballots. Josep Colomer writes of the 1559 conclave when a cardinal nearly won when an ally met confidentially with cardinals and asked them for a "token" approval vote for his friend to avoid a shut out – and then the cardinal came close to winning with votes on 17 of 32 ballots.[9]
• In the 13th through 18th centuries, the Republic of Venice elected the Doge of Venice using a multi-stage process that featured random selection and voting that allowed approval of multiple candidates and required a supermajority.[10][11]
• According to Steven J. Brams, approval voting was used for unspecified elections in 19th century England.[12]
• The selection of the Secretary-General of the United Nations has involved "straw poll" rounds of approval polling to help discover and build a consensus before a formal vote is held in the Security Council.[13] The United Nations Secretary-General selection, 2006 indicated that South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon was the only candidate to be acceptable to all five permanent members of the Security Council, which led to the withdrawal of India's Shashi Tharoor, who had the highest overall approval rate.[14]
• Approval voting was used in Greek legislative elections from 1864 to 1923, when it was replaced with proportional representation.[15]

When several seats are to be simultaneously filled, various forms of approval ballots are often used. Strictly speaking, these "Multiwinner Approval Voting" rules should not be confused with Approval Voting as a single-winner voting rule.

• Korean villages used block approval voting for competitive elections following the surrender of Japan, according to observations made by journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1946: "In one village there were twelve candidates, of whom five were to be chosen for the Village Committee. Each voter was given twelve cards, bearing the names of the candidates. He then cast his chosen ones into the white box and the rejected ones into the black." [16]
• Several Swiss cantons elect their government using such methods and so do French cities with population below 1000.[17]
• In 1963, the proportional representation in East Germany was replaced by a procedure in which the candidates had to receive more than 50% of the votes. Had more candidates than seats in this constituency won the majority, the order of the list would determine who would join the Volkskammer.[18]

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.[19][20][21] The party switched to using STAR voting in 2020.[22][23]

It is also used in internal elections by the American Solidarity Party,[24] the Green Parties of Texas[25][26] and Ohio,[27] the Libertarian parties of Texas[28] and Colorado,[29] the US Modern Whig[30] party, and the German Pirate Party.[31][32]

In 2018, Fargo, North Dakota passed a ballot initiative adopting approval voting for local elections, becoming the first US city and jurisdiction to adopt approval voting.[33][34] (A previous city commissioner election in 2015 suffered from six-way vote-splitting, resulting in a candidate winning with only a 22% plurality of the vote.[35]) The first election was held June 9, 2020, selecting two city commissioners.[36] Both winners received over 50% approval, with an average 2.3 approvals per ballot, and 62% of voters supported the change to approval voting in a poll.[37]

In 2020, St. Louis, Missouri passed an initiative to adopt approval voting followed by a top-two runoff (see Unified primary), thus becoming the second US city to adopt approval voting and the first to use a variant of it.[5][6]

The idea of approval was adopted by X. Hu and Lloyd Shapley in 2003[38] in studying authority distribution in organizations.

Approval voting has been adopted by several learned societies: the Society for Social Choice and Welfare (1992),[39] Mathematical Association of America (1986),[40] the American Mathematical Society,[41] the Institute of Management Sciences (1987) (now the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences),[42] the American Statistical Association (1987),[43] and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1987). The IEEE board in 2002 rescinded its decision to use approval voting. IEEE Executive Director Daniel J. Senese stated that approval voting was abandoned because "few of our members were using it and it was felt that it was no longer needed."[44] Because none of these associations report results to their members and the public, it is difficult to evaluate Senese's claim and whether it is also true of other associations; Steven Brams' analysis of the 5-candidate 1987 Mathematical Association of America presidential election shows that 79% of voters cast a ballot for one candidate, 16% for 2 candidates, 5% for 3, and 1% for 4, with the winner earning the approval of 1,267 (32%) of 3,924 voters.[44][45]

Approval voting was used for Dartmouth Alumni Association elections for seats on the College Board of Trustees, but after some controversy[46] it was replaced with traditional runoff elections by an alumni vote of 82% to 18% in 2009.[47] Dartmouth students started to use approval voting to elect their student body president in 2011. In the first election, the winner secured the support of 41% of voters against several write-in candidates.[48] In 2012, Suril Kantaria won with the support of 32% of the voters.[49] In 2013, 2014 and 2016, the winners also earned the support of under 40% of the voters.[50][51][52] Results reported in The Dartmouth show that in the 2014 and 2016 elections, more than 80 percent of voters approved of only one candidate.[51][52] Students replaced approval voting with plurality voting before the 2017 elections.[53]

Approval voting also can be used in social scenarios as a fairer, but still quick system compared to a First-Past-The-Post equivalent, being able to avoid a spoiler effect while being very quick to calculate.

Approval voting allows voters to select all the candidates whom they consider to be reasonable choices.

Strategic approval voting differs from ranked choice voting methods where voters might reverse the preference order of two options, which if done on a larger scale causes an unpopular candidate to win. Strategic Approval voting, with more than two options, involves the voter changing their approval threshold. The voter decides which options to give the same rating, even if they were to have a preference order between them.

Approval voting allows for bullet voting and compromising, while it is immune to push-over and burying.

Bullet Voting occurs when a voter approves only candidate 'a' instead of both 'a' and 'b' for the reason that voting for 'b' can cause 'a' to lose. The voter would be satisfied with either 'a' or 'b' but has a moderate preference for 'a'. Were 'b' to win, this hypothetical voter would still be satisfied.

Compromising occurs when a voter approves an additional candidate who is otherwise considered unacceptable to the voter to prevent an even worse alternative from winning.

Approval voting experts describe sincere votes as those "... that directly reflect the true preferences of a voter, i.e., that do not report preferences 'falsely.'"[64] They also give a specific definition of a sincere approval vote in terms of the voter's ordinal preferences as being any vote that, if it votes for one candidate, it also votes for any more preferred candidate. This definition allows a sincere vote to treat strictly preferred candidates the same, ensuring that every voter has at least one sincere vote. The definition also allows a sincere vote to treat equally preferred candidates differently. When there are two or more candidates, every voter has at least three sincere approval votes to choose from. Two of those sincere approval votes do not distinguish between any of the candidates: vote for none of the candidates and vote for all of the candidates. When there are three or more candidates, every voter has more than one sincere approval vote that distinguishes between the candidates.

Based on the definition above, if there are four candidates, A, B, C, and D, and a voter has a strict preference order, preferring A to B to C to D, then the following are the voter's possible sincere approval votes:

• vote for A, B, C, and D
• vote for A, B, and C
• vote for A and B
• vote for A
• vote for no candidates

If the voter instead equally prefers B and C, while A is still the most preferred candidate and D is the least preferred candidate, then all of the above votes are sincere and the following combination is also a sincere vote:

• vote for A and C

The decision between the above ballots is equivalent to deciding an arbitrary "approval cutoff." All candidates preferred to the cutoff are approved, all candidates less preferred are not approved, and any candidates equal to the cutoff may be approved or not arbitrarily.

A sincere voter with multiple options for voting sincerely still has to choose which sincere vote to use. Voting strategy is a way to make that choice, in which case strategic approval voting includes sincere voting, rather than being an alternative to it.[65] This differs from other voting systems that typically have a unique sincere vote for a voter.

When there are three or more candidates, the winner of an approval voting election can change, depending on which sincere votes are used. In some cases, approval voting can sincerely elect any one of the candidates, including a Condorcet winner and a Condorcet loser, without the voter preferences changing. To the extent that electing a Condorcet winner and not electing a Condorcet loser is considered desirable outcomes for a voting system, approval voting can be considered vulnerable to sincere, strategic voting.[66] In one sense, conditions where this can happen are robust and are not isolated cases.[67] On the other hand, the variety of possible outcomes has also been portrayed as a virtue of approval voting, representing the flexibility and responsiveness of approval voting, not just to voter ordinal preferences, but cardinal utilities as well.[68]

Approval voting avoids the issue of multiple sincere votes in special cases when voters have dichotomous preferences. For a voter with dichotomous preferences, approval voting is strategy-proof (also known as strategy-free).[69] When all voters have dichotomous preferences and vote the sincere, strategy-proof vote, approval voting is guaranteed to elect the Condorcet winner, if one exists.[70] However, having dichotomous preferences when there are three or more candidates is not typical. It is an unlikely situation for all voters to have dichotomous preferences when there are more than a few voters.[65]

Having dichotomous preferences means that a voter has bi-level preferences for the candidates. All of the candidates are divided into two groups such that the voter is indifferent between any two candidates in the same group and any candidate in the top-level group is preferred to any candidate in the bottom-level group.[71] A voter that has strict preferences between three candidates—prefers A to B and B to C—does not have dichotomous preferences.

Being strategy-proof for a voter means that there is a unique way for the voter to vote that is a strategically best way to vote, regardless of how others vote. In approval voting, the strategy-proof vote, if it exists, is a sincere vote.[64]

Another way to deal with multiple sincere votes is to augment the ordinal preference model with an approval or acceptance threshold. An approval threshold divides all of the candidates into two sets, those the voter approves of and those the voter does not approve of. A voter can approve of more than one candidate and still prefer one approved candidate to another approved candidate. Acceptance thresholds are similar. With such a threshold, a voter simply votes for every candidate that meets or exceeds the threshold.[65]

With threshold voting, it is still possible to not elect the Condorcet winner and instead elect the Condorcet loser when they both exist. However, according to Steven Brams, this represents a strength rather than a weakness of approval voting. Without providing specifics, he argues that the pragmatic judgements of voters about which candidates are acceptable should take precedence over the Condorcet criterion and other social choice criteria.[72]

Voting strategy under approval is guided by two competing features of approval voting. On the one hand, approval voting fails the later-no-harm criterion, so voting for a candidate can cause that candidate to win instead of a candidate more preferred by that voter. On the other hand, approval voting satisfies the monotonicity criterion, so not voting for a candidate can never help that candidate win, but can cause that candidate to lose to a less preferred candidate. Either way, the voter can risk getting a less preferred election winner. A voter can balance the risk-benefit trade-offs by considering the voter's cardinal utilities, particularly via the von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem, and the probabilities of how others vote.

A rational voter model described by Myerson and Weber specifies an approval voting strategy that votes for those candidates that have a positive prospective rating.[73] This strategy is optimal in the sense that it maximizes the voter's expected utility, subject to the constraints of the model and provided the number of other voters is sufficiently large.

An optimal approval vote always votes for the most preferred candidate and not for the least preferred candidate. However, an optimal vote can require voting for a candidate and not voting for a more preferred candidate if there 4 candidates or more.[74]

Other strategies are also available and coincide with the optimal strategy in special situations. For example:

• Vote for the candidates that have above average utility. This strategy coincides with the optimal strategy if the voter thinks that all pairwise ties are equally likely[75]
• Vote for any candidate that is more preferred than the expected winner and also vote for the expected winner if the expected winner is more preferred than the expected runner-up. This strategy coincides with the optimal strategy if there are three or fewer candidates or if the pivot probability for a tie between the expected winner and expected runner-up is sufficiently large compared to the other pivot probabilities.[76]
• Vote for the most preferred candidate only. This strategy coincides with the optimal strategy when there is only one candidate with a positive prospective rating.

Another strategy is to vote for the top half of the candidates, the candidates that have an above-median utility. When the voter thinks that others are balancing their votes randomly and evenly, the strategy maximizes the voter's power or efficacy, meaning that it maximizes the probability that the voter will make a difference in deciding which candidate wins.[77]

Optimal strategic approval voting fails to satisfy the Condorcet criterion and can elect a Condorcet loser. Strategic approval voting can guarantee electing the Condorcet winner in some special circumstances. For example, if all voters are rational and cast a strategically optimal vote based on a common knowledge of how all the other voters vote except for small-probability, statistically independent errors in recording the votes, then the winner will be the Condorcet winner, if one exists.[78]

In the example election described here, assume that the voters in each faction share the following von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities, fitted to the interval between 0 and 100. The utilities are consistent with the rankings given earlier and reflect a strong preference each faction has for choosing its city, compared to weaker preferences for other factors such as the distance to the other cities.

Using these utilities, voters choose their optimal strategic votes based on what they think the various pivot probabilities are for pairwise ties. In each of the scenarios summarized below, all voters share a common set of pivot probabilities.

In the first scenario, voters all choose their votes based on the assumption that all pairwise ties are equally likely. As a result, they vote for any candidate with an above-average utility. Most voters vote for only their first choice. Only the Knoxville faction also votes for its second choice, Chattanooga. As a result, the winner is Memphis, the Condorcet loser, with Chattanooga coming in second place. In this scenario, the winner has minority approval (more voters disapproved than approved) and all the others had even less support, reflecting the position that no choice gave an above-average utility to a majority of voters.

In the second scenario, all of the voters expect that Memphis is the likely winner, that Chattanooga is the likely runner-up, and that the pivot probability for a Memphis-Chattanooga tie is much larger than the pivot probabilities of any other pair-wise ties. As a result, each voter votes for any candidate they prefer more than the leading candidate, and also vote for the leading candidate if they prefer that candidate more than the expected runner-up. Each remaining scenario follows a similar pattern of expectations and voting strategies.

In the second scenario, there is a three-way tie for first place. This happens because the expected winner, Memphis, was the Condorcet loser and was also ranked last by any voter that did not rank it first.

Only in the last scenario does the actual winner and runner-up match the expected winner and runner-up. As a result, this can be considered a stable strategic voting scenario. In the language of game theory, this is an "equilibrium." In this scenario, the winner is also the Condorcet winner.

As this voting method is cardinal rather than ordinal, it is possible to model voters in a way that does not simplify to an ordinal method. Modelling voters with a 'dichotomous cutoff' assumes a voter has an immovable approval cutoff, while having meaningful cardinal preferences. This means that rather than voting for their top 3 candidates, or all candidates above the average approval (which may result in their vote changing if one candidate drops out, resulting in a system that does not satisfy IIA), they instead vote for all candidates above a certain approval 'cutoff' that they have decided. This cutoff does not change, regardless of which and how many candidates are running, so when all available alternatives are either above or below the cutoff, the voter votes for all or none of the candidates, despite preferring some over others. This could be imagined to reflect a case where many voters become disenfranchised and apathetic if they see no candidates they approve of. In a case such as this, many voters may have an internal cutoff, and would not simply vote for their top 3, or the above average candidates, although that is not to say that it is necessarily entirely immovable.

For example, in this scenario, voters are voting for candidates with approval above 50% (bold signifies that the voters voted for the candidate):

C wins with 65% of the voters' approval, beating B with 60%, D with 40% and A with 35%

If voters' threshold for receiving a vote is that the candidate has an above average approval, or they vote for their two most approved of candidates, this is not a dichotomous cutoff, as this can change if candidates drop out. On the other hand, if voters' threshold for receiving a vote is fixed (say 50%), this is a dichotomous cutoff, and satisfies IIA as shown below:

B now wins with 60%, beating C with 55% and D with 40%

With dichotomous cutoff, C still wins.

B now wins with 70%, beating C and A with 65%

With dichotomous cutoff, C still wins.

• Brams, Steven J.; Fishburn, Peter C. (1983). Approval Voting. Boston: Birkhäuser. ISBN 3764331240.