Approval Voting and Proportional Representation

At Independent Political Report, Ross Levin relays a lengthy and informative article from The New Yorker by Anthony Gottlieb that provides a short history of voting methods and systems in the modern world. The piece compares and contrasts plurality, winner-take-all voting with proportional representation, instant-runoff voting and approval voting. An excerpt dealing with approval and range voting from the end of the article:

Range and approval voting deal neatly with the problem of vote-splitting: if a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush. Above all, their advocates say, both schemes give voters more options, and would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority. Both can be modified to deliver forms of proportional representation.

The fact that they escape Arrow’s proof, though, doesn’t mean that approval and range voting have no hidden kinks or paradoxes. Whether such ideas can work depends on how people use them. If enough people are carelessly generous with their approval votes, for example, there could be some nasty surprises. In an unlikely set of circumstances, the candidate who is the favorite of more than half the voters could lose. Parties in an approval election might spend less time attacking their opponents, in order to pick up positive ratings from rivals’ supporters, and critics worry that it would favor bland politicians who don’t stand for anything much. Defenders insist that such a strategy would backfire in subsequent elections, if not before, and the case of Ronald Reagan suggests that broad appeal and strong views aren’t mutually exclusive . . .

Mathematics can suggest what approaches are worth trying, but it can’t reveal what will suit a particular place, and best deliver what we want from a democratic voting system: to create a government that feels legitimate to people—to reconcile people to being governed, and give them reason to feel that, win or lose (especially lose), the game is fair. The novelty of range and approval voting in modern politics is so great that we can’t know how they’ll work out without running experiments.

While instant-runoff voting is likely the most well known alternative voting method, polities that have implemented it have already begun struggling with its limitations, thus underscoring the need for voting system experimentation at the state and local level. Dale Sheldon-Hess writes at Least of All Evils:

Dr. David Schultz . . . has posted his report for the Minneapolis Elections Department on the use of ranked choice voting [PDF] (more commonly known as instant runoff voting or IRV), as it was used in that city's recent elections. Schultz was (and apparently still is) a strong supporter of the use of IRV, having previously served as a board member for FairVote Minnesota, a fact he plainly states in his paper's Conflict of Interest heading. And this refreshing honesty continues throughout the document... which probably isn't good news for FairVote's or Dr. Schultz's objectives.

First on the chopping block is the claim that IRV increases turnout . . . We also find that the well-advertised claim of decreased election costs turned out to not be true . . . But my "favorite" part of the report is the section on Spoiled Ballots and Voter Error. Schultz begins by assuring us that "[T]he worst fears were not realized." By which he means IRV only quadrupled the ballot-spoilage rate, from 1.0% to 4.1%. . . . The true measure of an electoral system's quality is how well it can handle highly-contested and close-to-call elections. The predominant examples suggests that IRV would handle such elections poorly; but the Minneapolis data provides no real information for or against that proposition.

Read the whole thing. Dale is, of course, a strong supporter of approval voting and range voting; he's also has recently been involved in an on-going debate with David L. Wetzell, an advocate of strategic election reform and "American Proportional Representation." David sums up his position in the debate at A New Kind of Third Party. I don't know if David is acquainted with
Pete Healey of the Proportional Representation Party, but if not, they should consider getting in contact. In comments to the above-mentioned post at IPR, Pete wrote:

“One size fits all” [voting systems] is a poor guide. Our concept for New York isn’t a complete abolition of single-member districts and isn’t fully proportional (at least at first). It’s a transitional system that would have the state legislature elected half from single-member districts and half by party-line proportional vote. Each voter enters the booth with two votes, one for his/her local rep and the other for the party he/she wishes to represent him/her in the legislature.