Talk:Positional voting system

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[edit] Approval voting not a positional voting system.

The article had the claim in it that Approval voting is a positional voting system. This is apparently based on the idea that one can take a marked Approval ballot and arrange the candidates in a rank order and assign points based on the approved ranks getting one vote an the unapproved zero vote. However, then, the different voting patterns have different weights for ranks. All have weight 1 for first ranks, all have weight 0 for last rank, but there is no general assignment of weights for the intermediate ranks. In a positional system there are, the weights do not vary with the votes.

The original editor may have been misled by the existence of papers comparing Approval with positional voting systems, but those papers would have been claiming a tautology if Approval were a positional voting system. My thanks to User:Tomruen for coming across this when he removed the Positional tag from the Range voting article. If Approval were a Positional voting system, so to, by the same argument, would be Range. --Abd (talk) 21:59, 23 December 2007 (UTC)