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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 2059131" data-attributes="member: 1264">You mean ties where two or more candidates get exactly the same number of votes? That's a non-issue in practice. Such ties can happen with any voting method, but are exponentially unlikely with a reasonable number of voters. (And I'm sure Morrus wouldn't mind handing out two Gold Ennies in that case. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)Keep in mind that Approval Voting encourages people to vote for multiple candidates, so the situation you just described will never happen. (The exact same situation can happen in IRV if everyone only ranks one choice per ballot - but that'll never happen in real life either.)Maybe I should have used "centrist" instead of "consensus", i.e. a candidate which most of the voters approve off, although they may not pick him as their first choice. Approval Voting tends to encourage such "middle of the road" candidates. (This is actually one of the more substantial arguments against it for political elections, because it discourages politicians from taking a stand.) IRV on the other hand encourages strong contrasts, because most of the power is located in the first-choice votes (the vast majority of lesser choices in the votes never actually comes into play). IRV may eliminate a centrist candidate early on in favor of a polarized choice that enjoys smaller actual support. Again, these are very well known and often discussed properties of Approval Voting and IRV.Some other known disadvantages of IRV:(1) nonmonotonicity: under some circumstances, ranking a candidate higher may actually cause him to lose(2) the 3rd-party spoiler effect: although IRV is often touted as a solution to the spoiler effect and a boon for 3rd parties, this only holds as long as said 3rd party is unlikely to win. As soon as you get more than two plausible winners, the spoiler effect returns, causing one to vote for the "lesser of two evils". (This is probably why Australia is still stuck with a 2-party system, even though it has used IRV since the 20's or so.)Some more endorsements of Approval Voting; - It is used by the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (>300K members), the US National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations, as well as numerous smaller professional organisations and universities.- "<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol292/issue5521/index.shtml#editorial" target="_blank">The Science of Elections</a>" S.J. Brams and D.R. Herschbach, Science May 25, 2001: 1449.- <a href="http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=000055AE-B864-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7&catID=3&topicID=11" target="_blank">Scientific American "Ask the Experts" discussion</a> (two leading mathematicians in favor of Approval, one for (gasp) Borda Count.- Some <a href="http://www.approvalvoting.org/faq.html#majority" target="_blank">FAQ questions on IRV vs Approval Voting</a>Why?Seriously - why would it be unfair to assume that a product you are familiar with and have a strong dislike for is actually *worse* than another Ennie nominee you are not familiar with? After all, these nominations have been through an exstensive vetting process already, so you know *something* about their quality. Why would it be more fair to assume that the unknown product is even worse than the one you know you detest? It's not as if you're forced to stick an exact value on the unknowns.In statistics, that sort of estimated quality of an unknown entry is called a prior, and it's perfectly acceptable to have a prior estimate which is higher than one of your known datapoints.</blockquote>

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