Abstract
Several leading professional associations have recently decided to use approval voting (AV). The largest of them, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), with more than 300,000 members, adopted AV in response to practical political problems with conventional plurality elections of precisely the sort that AV was designed to solve. This paper analyzes results of the first three multicandidate elections conducted by the IEEE using the new system. Issues examined include participation rates, use of multiple votes, patterns of shared support, majority rule, AV-dominance, effects on outcomes, and encouragement of candidate entry. In general, AV appears to have had a successful test.
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We thank Catherine Elhaded and George P. Sharrard for assistance in computer analyses of the 1988 voting data, which were kindly supplied to us by the Independent Election Corporation of America. We are also grateful to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for permission to publish their election results. Steven J. Brams gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Science Foundation under grant SES-871537.
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Brams, S.J., Nagel, J.H. Approval voting in practice. Public Choice 71, 1–17 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00138446
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00138446