> Approval Voting
> http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/center.html
>
> Personally, I think this should somehow be modified
> to have some sort of preferencing too, but it does solve some
> of the issues with STV/IRV, and is very simple to implement.

Approval Voting may be OK for some applications, but the basic problem is
that it encourages very tactical behaviour - people are liable to either
vote for only 1 candidate and against all the others, or perhaps vote for
all but one or two.

People with strong partisan support for one party may lose out on
influencing the result between two others, as do people with strong
opposition to one party (say fascists).

Unlike AV, later preferences will often work against earlier ones, since
they will be regarded as equal if they are positive votes.

Approval voting is basically a point-scoring system, and not entirely unlike
Borda, which allows a voter to give more points to some candidates than
others. This gives Borda a kinda preferentiality, but later preferences will
still count against earlier ones.

> Condorcet's Method
> http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/politics/condorcet.html
>
> I think this is a very complex method to explain to people,
> even more so than STV.

I would put Condorcet as close to AV. It seems indisputable that if one
candidate is preferred to each of the others by a majority, they should be
elected. The easiest way to explain it is to ask - what would happen if we
had n(n-1)/2 elections between every possible pair of candidates instead of
just 1 election with n candidates? Condorcet does these n(n-1)/2 elections
all at once.

The problem is that, unlike AV, later preferences can occasionally work
against earlier ones.


> STV mixed with Condorcet
> http://member.aol.com/loringrbt/elect.html

A nice idea. I don't know how often the condorcet winner is likely to be
excluded in multi-member STV elections. I would guess not very often. I
wrote a paper a little while ago on a more thorough integration of STV and
Condorcet, which appeared in Voting Matters. (Which may still be at
www.electoral-reform.org.uk )

More on the other links later....

Joe