[EM] News wanted about Maine's election.

[Sennet Williams]

So far I haven't seen anything since the election except that a democrat won the statehouse.
Hopefully there will be a lot of public analysis of this election, like I would like to know how much was spent by each candidate and party.  I assume that other parties had candidates in the general election, but don't know.  I don't really have enough time online to do the research myself right now.
about approval voting:   IRV voters obviously get only one vote each,  I suppose we will find it how the court treats approval.
-Sennet

[⸘Ŭalabio‽]

about approval voting:? ?IRV voters obviously get only one vote each,? I suppose we will find it how the court treats approval.

"1 Person, 1 vote” means equal voting strength. Approval gives each voter 1 vote per candidate. That is fine. What would be illegal would be giving some people more voting power, such as giving reach people up to a zillion votes per candidate.
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[Toby Pereira]

I think some people take an approval for a candidate as a "vote", which a voter should only have one of, but this does seem superficial. There's no reason why "one person one vote" should mean "name one candidate then shut up", or if you do want to interpret it like that, then it's not a principle you should want to hold onto. In any case, would those that consider approval voting a violation of "one person one vote" consider score voting to be a similar violation? In score voting, you're not casting votes for candidates as such, rather just giving them a score out of a set number. However, approval voting is just the most basic form of score voting with scores out of 1. Viewed like that, it seems less like a violation.

From: ➘Ŭalabio“ <***@MacOSX.Com>
To: EM <election-***@lists.electorama.com>; Sennet Williams <***@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, 10 November 2018, 21:24
Subject: Re: [EM] News wanted about Maine's election.

    about approval voting:? ?IRV voters obviously get only one vote each,? I suppose we will find it how the court treats approval.

    "1 Person, 1 vote” means equal voting strength.  Approval gives each voter 1 vote per candidate.  That is fine.  What would be illegal would be giving some people more voting power, such as giving reach people up to a zillion votes per candidate.
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[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

Post by ⸘Ŭalabio‽

about approval voting:? ?IRV voters obviously get only one vote each,? I suppose we will find it how the court treats approval.

"1 Person, 1 vote” means equal voting strength. Approval gives each voter 1 vote per candidate. That is fine. What would be illegal would be giving some people more voting power, such as giving reach people up to a zillion votes per candidate.

Giving people N votes is still one-person one-vote, it's called Score
Voting. You could call it fractional votes.

The argument for IRV is that, though people may cast more than one vote,
only one vote at a time is counted. However, with Approval, if we count
the votes like IRV, and the counting comes down to the last two
candidates, either

1. The voter has voted for neither. Moot. However, under Robert's Rules,
this could count for consideration of whether or not a winner obtained a
majority. Robert's Rules, in their preferential voting counting rules
that FairVote touts as supporting "IRV," an "exhausted ballot" still
counts for the purposes of determining a majority, and RR requires the
election be repeated (with new nominations!) if no candidate is approved
by a majority. By the way, in real repeated elections, i.e., top two
runoff, each voter gets two votes. Nobody ever complained that this
violated one-person, one-vote.

2. The voter has voted for one and not the other. The additional vote is
moot. But the voter did get to express approval of that candidate, which
can make a difference in later politics.

3. The voter has voted for both. The votes do not determine the winner,
but, gain, might matter if the winner must have a majority.

The idea that approval violates "one person, one vote" is one of those
stupid, knee-jerk ideas, fairly common, based on abuse of the meaning of
words, and the intentions behind them.
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