New Hampshire Approval Voting Bill Shot Down

HB240, the bill in the New Hampshire state house to enact approval voting, has failed to pass, having been deemed "Inexpedient to Legislate."

Apparently, some of the same state representatives who shot down Dr. Steven Brams' original push for approval voting in the state back in the 70s are still in the house, and did not find any of the research performed since 2000 persuasive.

I can only hope that this does not deter the approval voting advocates. Perhaps, given more time, they can persuade more of their colleagues of the system's benefits.

More on New Hampshire Approval Voting Bill

The story has made it all the way around my corner of the internet and found its way to Slashdot (which links back to how I ended up writing about this topic in the first place), so now would be a good time to summarize some of the arguments and counter arguments I've been having with people about this:

First, look over to the right and take note of the pink-highlighted link, What Do You Mean By Best?. There I talk about Arrow's Theorem, the debate over voting systems and voting system criteria, and how computer simulations can help us resolve it. Approval voting and range voting stand head-and-shoulders above other alternatives. This is especially important to the Slashdot crowd, because many Linux distributions, as well as Wikimedia, all perform their elections using a Condorcet method, and so many have come to accept that Condorcet methods are the way forward (although the Fedora project uses range voting). Regular readers will of course recall that Condorcet's ideal is better-met by approval voting than by any actual rank-based "Condorcet method".

The bill is having committee hearings next week; I'll continue to keep you posted.

Approval Voting Bill Introduced in New Hampshire

Longer pieces are in the works, but I have a quick link to share. A bill has been introduced in the state of New Hampshire to move all state-level elections to approval voting. But potentially even more interesting, the bill would move the chronologically-important New Hampshire presidential primary to approval voting as well. I'll be keeping an eye on this as it continues throughout the legislative session.