Glossary — Approval Voting¶
Method-specific terms for Approval. Shared, cross-method vocabulary (spoiler / vote-splitting, monotonicity, summability, the Equal Vote criterion…) lives in the main glossary.
- Approval voting — mark each candidate 0 or 1 (approve / not); the most approvals wins. Score voting at 1-bit resolution. → Approval Voting; demo
approval_101_c3_b5 - Approval threshold ("where's my line?") — the one hard choice an Approval ballot forces: how good must a candidate be to earn your approval. Shift the line and the result can change — Approval's central limitation. → Approval Voting — Honest Limits
- Dichotomous profile / dichotomous preferences — the theorists' name for what an Approval ballot is: a ranking with exactly two levels — approved above not-approved, nothing said inside either group. It names a restricted domain, and on it Approval coincides with Borda and with every Condorcet method (a Condorcet winner always exists there). Useful to know precisely, because the equivalence is routinely over-quoted as "Approval elects the Condorcet winner": true of the approval ballots, not of the opinions voters compressed to produce them. → main glossary entry · Approval in the theory literature · worked: when compression moves the Condorcet winner
- Double-bubble (Yes/No) ballot — an Approval ballot with an explicit Yes and No bubble per candidate, so a blank is distinguishable from a deliberate "No" (a ballot-security hardening).
- Approval + Top-Two ("unified primary") — a nonpartisan Approval primary whose two most-approved candidates meet in a head-to-head general (St. Louis since 2021; Oregon's 2014 Unified Primary proposal). The runoff must be a second election — re-counting the same 0/1 ballots head-to-head just returns the approval margin — which is the gap STAR's 0–5 ballot closes. → Approval + Top-Two
- Bloc / SPAV / PAV — multi-winner Approval: at-large bloc counting, or the proportional Sequential/Proportional Approval variants. → Approval Voting — Multi-Winner
Approval is the 1-bit rung of the scored family (Approval → Range → STAR); see the fidelity ladder. Shared criteria are in the main glossary.