ternary operator vote

[Andrew Koenig]

Dave> Yes, but his reasoning is flawed because it turns the voting
Dave> process into "the only thing that is acceptable is getting what
Dave> I want".

This claim makes no sense to me.  Can you give an example?

Dave> The approval voting process is not immune to rigging, either. In
Dave> the political realm, if you know you can easily get 20% of the
Dave> votes but see diminishing returns beyond that, then you stop
Dave> putting money into expanding support for your cause and you
Dave> instead "prop up" lots of opposing views with little
Dave> differentiation between them. That way you will win because you
Dave> divide and conquer your opposition.

The whole point of approval voting is to make this strategy impossible.

Dave> In terms of this PEP, the way to accomplish this is to encourage
Dave> support for many different forms of the PEP (short-circuiting
Dave> versus not, new keywords versus not, etc.) so that the people in
Dave> favor of it are too splintered and no single suggestion has
Dave> enough votes to beat out a small but unified coalition of people
Dave> against it.

With approval voting -- letting voters vote for all the alternatives
they are willing to accept -- no splintering occurs.

Dave> Going the other way, the people in favor of the PEP could reach
Dave> a consensus and then splinter those against it by encouraging
Dave> little sub-groups to form: those who oppose any changes, those
Dave> who would concede to a builtin function, etc.

Again, that's impossible.  As long as everyone who is willing to
accept the status quo votes for the status quo (plus whatever other
alternatives that person is willing to accept), no splintering is
possible.

Dave> In the end, approval voting actually satisfies the _least_
Dave> number of people, and because it encourages very few people to
Dave> cooperate, on average the decision chooses something that a
Dave> larger number of people consider to be more extreme.

This statment is so far from how I think approval voting works
that I can only conclude that you have the wrong idea about what
approval viting is.


-- 
Andrew Koenig, ark at research.att.com, http://www.research.att.com/info/ark