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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 2058947" data-attributes="member: 177">As you describe it, Approval Voting can yield ties.  Not just between two leaders, but between any number of candidates.  The ballots contain little information you can use to resolve the tie, and you must make assumptiosn about the voter's intent in order to use it.Basic Instant Runoff Voting can also have ties, but the ballots contain further information you can use to resolve them without making assumptions about the user's intent.Oh?  If any one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote on the first pass, either IRV or AV will show it.  If a candidate gets less than that consensus, AV will still give the win to the leader.  With AV and five candidates, a winner can have just over 20% of the people voting for it.  You want to claim that 21% is a consensus?It is precisely this problem that IRV is designed to avoid.  If the consensus is not clear on the first pass, it has other information on hand about how much people like the products.  If it is unfair to rank an unknown last, it is even more unfair to rank an unknown ahead of a known.  In essence, you're saying that people get to (are even forced to) lie, and say they like an unknown better or worse.  If I was in a shop, planning to buy a product with my own money, it might be reasonable to estimate the quality of an unknown.  But it is not reasonable for an awards program.  "Unbiased" does not mean "accurate" or even "fair".  I think that the estimate here actually can contain a bias.  Any time you estimate a quality, you can introduce bias, based upon how you make your estimate.  Say there's three products - the voter liked A, disliked B, and does not know C.  If he thinks to himself, "A number of other things from C's publisher were good, so it must be better than B", and approves A and C, the voter has just introduced a bias for a product that has nothing to do with the product itself.  That isn't fair.This is a problem with approval voting - it has only two states, and that forces people to vote as if they had knowledge they do not.</blockquote>

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