Approval Voting
What the ballot looks like with Approval voting
With Approval voting, voters indicate all the options of which they approve. This makes the ballots very simple compared to score-based or ranked-choice voting systems.
Here's an example of what a ballot will look like that supports Approval voting:
Sample Ballot
How the winner is determined
Determining the winner is very simple under Approval voting. The approvals are summed up, and the candidate with the highest approval wins.
For your ballot above, the following points would be awarded to each candidate:
Where Approval voting performs best
Approval voting is best suited for situations where choices are not mutually exclusive and voters have no ranked preference between choices.
A perfect example of this is deciding on the best time for a meeting to maximize attendance. Since a voter might be able to attend at multiple different times, the options are not mutually exclusive, and since a voter is either able to attend or not, there's no need to express a ranked preference between choices.
Approval voting is also seen as a very simple and powerful voting system for the election of government officials. Nearly every voting machine in the United States is capable of using Approval voting, unlike score-based or ranked-choice voting systems. And since voters can vote for multiple candidates, Approval voting elects consensus candidates more than Plurality voting.
Where Approval voting performs worst
Approving voting does not perform well in a couple of situations.
First, Approval voting should not be used in situations where the options are mutually exclusive to the voter. For example, when looking at the number of senior citizens in a population, a voter will either fall into the bucket of "Below 65" or "65 and Over".
A second situation where Approval voting should be avoided is when the voter might reasonably have a ranked preference between options. For example, in the election of government officials, if the voting machines are capable, certain score-based and ranked-choice voting systems will likely perform better than Approval voting.
Try Approval voting
Create your own poll and send it to your friends to see how Approval voting performs.