Approval versus Disfavor

Within 500 words:

Approval Voting is the best remedy to the most deeply troubling problem facing democracy on our planet. Throughout human history, only one family of voting methods have dominated our elections: ranked/ordinal methods. But most humans remain blind to the severity of that failure. We have entrusted these ordinal methods to count our voter support, and they have categorically failed us. What has always been needed is a cardinal method, measuring voter support for every candidate. This has finally arisen in 1978 with the publication of Approval Voting.

Ordinal (ranked) methods, impose restrictive instructions that prevent a democratic count. For centuries, mathematicians have often been troubled by the unfair outcomes of history's elections, opening branches of study to remedy them. But almost no one has traced the problem back to its cause of the restrictive instructions. Ordinal methods’ imperative commands, like "Choose Only One" or "Rank These By Preference," just manipulate the voter into making inequalities and change-resistant insincerity of Mandated Disfavor.

Disfavor is a crucial idea. The term “favor” allures voters. This allows election officials to manipulate the voters into prevented data collection. Their desire for "hope and change" tends to promotes new choices and candidates, which increase in popularity the more dissatisfied the electorate become. But using imperative commands for separating the candidates into unequal ranks, the voting method actively shuts down equal assessment of candidates. The newest choices are typically shown the most disfavor, entrenching two-party systems instead.

Human history continues to wallow in the stupor of ranked methods. However, mathematicians have yielded progress in election science. In 1770 Jean-Charles de Borda introduced "The Borda Count" when he headed the Academy of Sciences. Soon, Marquis de Condorcet and others developed fairness criteria to advance the study of voting methods. This finally climaxed when Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem in 1951, saying "there are no fair ranked voting methods."

A Sophie's Choice is an undesirable decision imposed under duress. It often contains so-called choices that the voter would never have designed, such as "choose which of your children will be sacrificed to the concentration camps" in the original novel of that name. We face a similar decision in which there is no sane reason that we must disfavor our candidates, and yet they instruct we do. If we support a victory by any of several candidates, the data must reflect that support. The mandate to rank, and thus disfavor, exists to prevent the sincere collection of our data. It violates the trust to which our election officials are charged.

With Approval Voting, we are finally given a voting method that is just as simple as the most popular methods of the past, but freed of duress-driven decision trees of a ranking process. We can have our cake and eat it too, as there are no penalties for expressing both sincere idealism and strategic bet-hedging. It is history's first truly democratic method.