Approval Voting: A Multi-outcome Election

This paper deals with approval voting and its critical strategy profile. Approval voting is a single winner voting system used for multi-candidate elections. In this method each voter may vote for as many of the candidates as she wishes that is the voter votes for all candidates of whom the voter approves. In Approval voting no ranking is involved, so all the votes have equal weight. Some scientific and engineering societies adopted approval voting but unfortunately yet has not adopted in any public election, despite efforts to institute it, so its success should be judge as mixed. The paper discusses aspects of approval voting and compares with some other voting rules. Approval voting may elect Condorcet winners or Condorcet losers. In addition the paper is enlightened to stability of approval voting outcomes