A Representative Committee by Approval Balloting

Subiza, Begoña; Peris, Josep E.

doi:10.1007/s10726-017-9527-9

“…Kilgour, Brams, and Sanver (2006), Kilgour (2010), Kilgour and Marshall (2012), and Elkind, Faliszewski, Skowron, and Slinko (2017) review a variety of methods for electing committees using approval ballots. A number of analysts (Sánches-Fernández, Fernández Garcia, and Fisteus, 2016;Subiza and Peris, 2014;Brill, Laslier, and Skowron, 2016) have suggested using divisor methods of apportionment (more on these methods later) as a basis for selecting multiple winners. We adopt this approach here, addressing, among other topics, the representativeness of the candidates that different versions of these methods elect, which previous studies have not analyzed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiwinner approval voting: an apportionment approach

Brams

¹

,

Kilgour

²

,

Potthoff

³

2018

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We extend approval voting so as to elect multiple candidates, who may be either individuals or members of a political party, in rough proportion to their approval in the electorate. We analyze two divisor methods of apportionment, first proposed by Jefferson and Webster, that iteratively depreciate the approval votes of voters who have one or more of their approved candidates already elected. We compare the usual sequential version of these methods with a nonsequential version, which is computationally complex but feasible for many elections. Whereas Webster apportionments tend to be more representative of the electorate than those of Jefferson, the latter, whose equally spaced vote thresholds for winning seats duplicate those of cumulative voting in 2-party elections, is even-handed or balanced.

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“…Kilgour, Brams, and Sanver (2006), Kilgour (2010), Kilgour and Marshall (2012), and Elkind, Faliszewski, Skowron, and Slinko (2017) review a variety of methods for electing committees using approval ballots. A number of analysts (Sánches-Fernández, Fernández Garcia, and Fisteus, 2016;Subiza and Peris, 2014;Brill, Laslier, and Skowron, 2016) have suggested using divisor methods of apportionment (more on these methods later) as a basis for selecting multiple winners. We adopt this approach here, addressing, among other topics, the representativeness of the candidates that different versions of these methods elect, which previous studies have not analyzed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiwinner Approval Voting: An Apportionment Approach

Brams

¹

,

Kilgour

²

,

Potthoff

³

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We extend approval voting so as to elect multiple candidates, who may be either individuals or members of a political party, in rough proportion to their approval in the electorate. We analyze two divisor methods of apportionment, first proposed by Jefferson and Webster, that iteratively depreciate the approval votes of voters who have one or more of their approved candidates already elected. We compare the usual sequential version of these methods with a nonsequential version, which is computationally complex but feasible for many elections. Whereas Webster apportionments tend to be more representative of the electorate than those of Jefferson, the latter, whose equally spaced vote thresholds for winning seats duplicate those of cumulative voting in 2-party elections, is even-handed or balanced.

show abstract