Although I generally accept Brams and Herschbach's critique of the plurality, Borda, and Hare systems, and accept that the approval voting scheme is the easiest to implement on existing equipment, I question its psychological effects.
It is still possible to vote negatively by selecting "all but one" candidate and this too distorts the outcome. Since votes are free rather than treated as a currency of any limited sort, you can expect many heavily marked ballots generated without a lot of thought. I think this system demonstrates too much trust in the way people form social trust beliefs. I would be much more comfortable with "disapproval" systems where you mark against the ones you distrust. That is more like the daily human reality of trusting everyone you pass on the street or in any public place unless and until they give you some reason to reach for your wallet or gun. Distrust is the basis of concious political life, and happy ignorance of the ugly realities of running a government the goal, so it would be far better to acknowledge that psychologically and encourage people to tell us actively who they have genuine concerns about. The list of names should be those who have alarmed us, not those who have impressed us with their ability to lay it on.
Approval systems seem to me to be vulnerable to spin doctors in a much deeper way than ranked vote or even plurality systems: the incentive is clearly there to get anyone who approves of an opponent to approve of dozens of others as if they were brand name cereals on the shelf at the grocery store.
This may be a philosophical issue of trust in government and the negative nature of abstraction itself, but I think I like systems that smack of "drafting a leader and disapproving the worst" which are like the jury system, rather than "parading a bunch of hucksters and selecting only the most impressive" which smacks of commercial life and mating displays. It just seems like image politics on crack.
It also seems likely to me that with no ranking of candidates, the "major parties" will run "noise candidates" with similar names and "fringe candidates" with unpopular views that give rise to a feeling of distaste so that anyone who is "too close" to them politically is likely to be excluded from the approval.
Let's look at this more fundamentally, as Robin Hanson does: voting on values in the polling booth, betting on beliefs in the marketplace with good consumer labeling. As Jane Jacobs suggests in "Systems of Survival", the definition of corruption is confusing the Guardian and Trader ethics of government and commerce, respectively. A Guardian is unconciously trusted like the infrastructure of bridges and water taps. If they come to our attention, it's ultimately a bad thing.
The further away from the commercial system of approved brand names that we can get in the political system, the better. Our moral leaders are not in the legislatures nor should they be - they should be in the streets and in the workplaces and most especially in the schools and the churches and temples and mosques. And above all, in our emergency response services that actively save real lives.
I don't know the name of a single fireman in my town. If I find out the name of a police officer it is likely because he is charged with some abuse of power. Some think that is a shame, but I think the media exist to sell newspapers and that only worry, concern, anxiety, can sell them faster than before. I think we promote chaos by approving and we promote ethics by disapproving.
"A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy" - Mohandas Gandhi
In such a society, where we do not fear daily violence, we are surely trusting everyone all the time rather than just fearing them silently. We should not be afraid to say "I distrust you" publicly. I believe such a society would have drafted candidates and volunteer candidates indistinguishable on the same ballot, and one would disapprove of those names one wished to opt out of trusting. They would be trusted somewhere else. I think perhaps by default the ballot should be open not secret, and that keeping it secret should be another such option, positively chosen, for those who wished to hide in the mob.
To help leaders evolve, it would be ideal if they were able to understand exactly what their personal web of trust looks like, and perhaps even to have anonymous ways to get a line or two of explanation as to why they were mistrusted.
We live in a more complex world today than centuries ago. It makes sense to provide candidates far more feedback on their performance, at an expense of more voter time spent.
That is the price I think we must pay for the complexity of our modern society. So, too, we may have to give up most of the privacy of the secret ballot in order to provide more exact information about how webs of trust between voters and candidates actually look for the society as a whole. That facilitates trust in emergencies which is an increasingly important feature in an age of biotechnology and artificial intelligence, which combine in ways that we cannot yet forsee, and will likely challenge humans for control of Earth some day. In such situations, it would be good to have a formal mathematical model of why a human is trusted to thermally nuke an entire city to end a plague...
It seems unthinkable to us from the 20th century, but so was the 20th century to those of the 19th. High risk high tech high touch... Somewhere in there we need high trust. Let's build it in from the start so we know where we stand.
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