Choice by consent

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In the case of a ballot for an election by consent , the voter can vote as many candidates as desired.

The election by approval ( English Approval Voting ) is an electoral process in which the voter has the opportunity to vote for any number of the candidates. He no longer chooses the candidate with the highest preference , but all those who appear acceptable to him. The candidate with the most votes received wins the election.

features

With the option of choosing only one candidate, the most polarizing candidate can win through election arithmetic, while the most popular candidate is more likely to win the vote through approval. In a French study, for example, it was found that in the 2002 presidential election in France , if the mode had been through approval in the first round, there would have been a runoff between the conservative incumbent Jacques Chirac and the socialist Lionel Jospin instead of the actual runoff between Chirac and the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen , as Jospin would have received significantly more popular approval than Le Pen.

The choice by consent is a simplified form of the assessment choice in which only the points 0 and 1 are possible.

variants

In the case of a simple vote by agreeing with only one cross, the missing cross is mathematically always a rejection (“no vote”). With this variant, it is not possible for the voter to express his or her abstention for a specific candidate. You can only abstain from all candidates together with an invalid ballot paper.

Vote by consent with abstention

Technical design

In order to allow one abstention per candidate, there are two (purely technical) designs for the ballot papers:

  • One offers an approval and a rejection field.
  • One offers an approval, a rejection and an abstention field.

In the variant without an abstention field, you do not need to put a cross on the candidate to express your abstention. In the case of the variant with an abstention field, it is made clear to the voter that he has the option of abstaining and subsequent manipulation of the ballot is made more difficult.

Differences in voting by consent without abstention

Abstaining from voting has several advantages:

  • In the case of a large number of candidates who are not completely known to the voter, the lack of information on individual candidates does not have to lead to a rejection. The voter can therefore specify his knowledge of the candidates more precisely.
  • With the abstention there is the possibility to recognize a simple majority (more agreement than rejection). However, voting by consent without abstention can only be recognized by an absolute majority (more consent than other votes).
  • It is possible in one or a few ballots to vote a fixed number of candidates if one consequently chooses a simple majority (to take into account the abstentions).

An election by consent with abstention corresponds to a combination of n ballots into one ballot, where n is the number of candidates.

This also results in a disadvantage of this variant:

  • With a high number of candidates, the effort involved in counting is higher than with voting without abstentions.
  • Abstaining from voting is not a good way of determining ranking when you have a large number of candidates.

application

The electoral mode is used in some scientific institutions as well as in the election of the Secretary General of the United Nations . In the Soviet Union and some Eastern European countries, a similar system was used for internal party elections in the second half of the 1980s, in which the names of the candidates could not be ticked, but crossed out. This is how the voter expressed his disapproval of a candidate. In terms of logic, however, both systems are equivalent.

In Germany, the vote is used by the consent of the Pirate Party and BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN Munich in candidate elections. Also, the vote by consent is partly used within the Pirate Party in the preliminary decision to vote on applications if several competing applications are to be voted on. The election by consent with abstention was first carried out at the assembly meeting of the Lower Saxony Pirate Party in Wolfenbüttel. From 68 applicants, 30 candidates could be chosen in four hours and one ballot.

tactics

There are obvious ways to choose tactically:

If the voter has no information about the likely outcome of the election, it is advisable to vote for those candidates who are perceived to be above average. If a race between two candidates is looming and the voter in the simple majority system would choose the lesser evil, the optimal tactic is to also choose this in approval voting and all of those that are preferred over the compromise candidate.

Nevertheless, approval voting is more resistant to tactics. Let us assume that the election proceeds anonymously and without announcing interim results while the voting is still in progress. Furthermore, if one assumes that a voter only wants to optimize the immediate election result and does not pursue long-term tactics, then the voter has no reason to put a compromise candidate above his favorite. If the same candidate appears repeatedly in the course of several elections, the tactic of ticking the compromise candidate and those who are preferred results in a more precise representation of the majority will.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jean-François Laslier, Karine Vander Straeten: Approval Voting: An experiment during the French 2002 Presidential Election (PDF; 99 kB)
  2. ^ Stadtverband Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen Munich: Green Munich: Statute. In: www.gruene-muenchen.de. Retrieved January 18, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Voting by consent with abstention to determine a state list of the Lower Saxony Pirate Party (protocol) [1] .

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