/an Experiment in Approval Voting

In its 1985 election for council The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) ran a test of approval voting by sending a non-binding approval ballot to its members along with the regular plurality ballot. In approval voting a person votes for (approves of) as many candidates as desired, the winner being the candidate with the most votes. Two of the TIMS contests had three candidates for a single office and a third had five candidates for two offices. In such situations approval voting can produce winners who are more generally acceptable to the electorate than standard plurality voting. This is because the approval mechanism tends to prevent two candidates with broad appeal from splitting a majority constituency and electing a minority candidate. Of these three TIMS contests two would have had different winners had approval voting been binding. In the first election with candidates A, B, and C, C narrowly beat B in the regular election, but B was the approval winner because considerably more of A's supporters approved of B than C. In the second election approval and plurality voting agreed on the winner. In the third election with two positions to be filled from a field of five candidates. A, B, C, D, and E, B was a winner by either method, but the official second winner. A, placed fourth in the approval vote behind C and D. Close examination of ranking data shows that in the first election a head to head contest between B and C would be a toss up. Nevertheless, because of secondary support, B is a better choice by the criterion of broad acceptance by the electorate. In the third election C and D are similarly close but either would have broader support than the plurality choice A and of the two C has somewhat broader general approval. It should be pointed out that, as approval voting creates new winners, it must also create new losers. A minority constituency has more difficulty taking advantage of a majority split to install their candidate. The TIMS experiment demonstrated remarkably well the points made by the proponents of approval voting, namely, that it is a simple and effective way to do a better job than plurality voting at selecting the candidates who have the broadest base of support among the electorate.