Steven J. Brams Quotes
A simple election reform to encourage moderates to run, and win, would be approval voting, in which voters can “approve of”—and thereby vote for—as many candidates as they like. The candidate with the most “approvals”—votes—wins the election. Because approval voting does not restrict voters to supporting only one candidate, it tends to result in the election of a centrist, not the strongest minority candidate who benefits from a divided field. Approval voting is widely used by major engineering and scientific societies to elect their officers. At NYU, the politics and economics departments use it to elect a chair. To implement approval voting in public elections, the parties could choose to use it in their primaries, or state legislatures could mandate its use. Bills to do this have been introduced in several states, including New Hampshire.
Steven J. Brams, Letter to the Editor, The Atlantic, October 2016
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Florida’s vote counting system was extremely primitive and highly subjective, and no one could really ever tell whether Al Gore or George W. Bush ever won the state whose electoral votes determined the election of 2000. The Supreme Court finally decided that Bush would be president, but no one wanted such a situation to ever happen again. Blackwell had better technology in Ohio in the next election but Ohio various techniques were used to keep some Blacks from voting.
This is not just a theoretical possibility. It has occurred several times. The latest was on the 1990 election where Gore got half a million more votes than George W. Bush, but Bush became President.
The voting problems we have had are managerially and technology solvable but politically each solution is perceived as favoring one of the political parties in the particular jurisdiction and therefore there is resistance to the change.
Steven J. Brams is an American game theorist and political scientist at the New York University Department of Politics. Brams is best known for using the techniques of game theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory to analyze voting systems and fair division. He is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting, as well as extensions of approval voting to multiple-winner elections to give proportional representation of different interests.
