Approval voting

Approval voting is a single-winner voting method used for elections. Each voter may "approve" of (i.e., select) any number of candidates. The winner is the most-approved candidate.

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

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.

By treating each candidate as a separate question, "Do you approve of this person for the job?" approval voting lets each voter indicate support for one, some, or all candidates. All votes count equally, and everyone gets the same number of votes: one vote per candidate, either for or against. Final tallies show how many voters support each candidate, and the winner is the candidate whom the most voters support.

Approval voting ballots show, for each office being contested, a list of the candidates running for that seat. Next to each name is a checkbox, or another similar way to mark "Yes" or "No" for that candidate. This "check yes or no" approach means approval voting provides one of the simplest ballots for a voter to understand.

Ballots on which the voter marked every candidate the same (whether yes or no) have no effect on the outcome of the election. Each ballot can, therefore, be viewed as a small "delta" that separates two groups of candidates: those supported and those that are not. Each candidate approved is considered preferred to any candidate not approved, while the voter's preferences among approved candidates is unspecified, and likewise the voter's preferences among unapproved candidates is also unspecified.

Approval voting has been adopted by the Mathematical Association of America (1986), the American Mathematical Society, the Institute of Management Sciences (1987) (now the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), the American Statistical Association (1987), 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 The IEEE board in 2002 rescinded its decision to use approval voting.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." 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.

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