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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2061032" data-attributes="member: 7240">But this is assuming people are being "gentlemen" about who is acceptable and who is not. I would rather not assume that voters will vote in favour of a product they merely find acceptable if a possible consequence of doing so is that their favourite product loses. I certainly wouldn't be enough of a "gentleman" to vote for a product that I thought was second-best if I felt that doing so would effectively neutralize my vote for my favourite product Why bother voting at all then unless my primary motivation is to engineer the defeat of some product I loathe? As with many models that style themselves "approval voting," the actual net effect of your system is to reward voting strategies that are based on defeating bad things and punish voting strategies that are based on rewarding good things. Furthermore, I can't really detect how you have reasoned that your model of approval voting will somehow be more beneficial to products about which the voter does not know. There is no system we could design that would place little-known products on the same footing as well-known products. As in real-life elections, there is no way to do well if the voters don't know who or what you are. And that, in my view, is a good thing.This criticism is true of Borda, which uses a ranked ballot but is completely false for the system Umbran and I are advocating. If my favourite product is Monte Cook: Black Sheep and I know that my second choice, Gygax is significantly more popular. It is still perfectly rational for me to make Monte my first choice and Gygax my second choice because the only condition under which my vote will transfer to my second choice will be if my first choice has already been defeated. So, no -- IRV is the best system for choosing a single winner because I am punished, not rewarded for incorrectly representing my non-first choices on the ballot. You have yet to demonstrate (a) that IRV is difficult to implement or (b) that approval voting results in unknown candidates doing better or (c) that unknown candidates should do better.Finally, if you want to look at voting systems that are actually supported by a large number of academics, are in use all over the world in functioning democracies and are well-described, check out <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/" target="_blank">http://www.fairvote.org/</a>. As you can see, plurality, majoritarian and proportional systems have vastly more public and academic support than the particular model of approval voting you are pushing.</blockquote>

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