poly: approval voting, etc

Robin Hanson wrote:
> ... I do like approval
> voting, which is intuitive and easy to explain, and
> does seems to clearly improve on simple plurality.

I like it too, though (like all the other methods mentioned here) it
fails to capture *degrees* of preference - which the marketplace does
automagically btw. (I'm still waiting for science fiction to address
the problem of assigning votes to composite intelligences like
Boaty-Bits. I want an ambassador to say, "What's the problem? At home
they get as many votes as they pay for, same as anyones else.")

How about fractional approval? While not addressing the strategic
question mentioned by Brams & Fishburn
(http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/altvote.html), it does
allow a distinction, lost in other methods: does a ballot saying "Smith
> Jones > Brown" mean approval ratings of .9 .8 .1, or .9 .2 .0? Does a ballot saying "Smith or Jones but not Brown" mean .9 .8 .1 or .9 .5 .1?

(I was once in a club, the Champaign-Urbana Science Fiction Association,
which elected officers by partible plurality - that is, you get one vote
which you may divide however you please. Usually it took some time to
compute the values of some of the votes.)

-- 
Anton Sherwood  *\\*  br0nt0@p0b0x.com  *\\*  http://ogre.nu