Satisfaction Approval Voting

We propose a new voting system, satisfaction approval voting (SAV), for multiwinner elections, in which voters can approve of as many candidates or as many parties as they like. However, the winners are not those who receive the most votes, as under approval voting (AV), but those candidates or parties that maximize the sum of the satisfaction scores of all voters, where a voter's satisfaction score is the fraction of his or her approved candidates who are elected. If individuals are the candidates, SAV may give a different outcome from AV—in fact, SAV and AV outcomes may be disjoint—but SAV generally chooses candidates representing more diverse interests than does AV (this is demonstrated empirically in the case of a recent election of the Game Theory Society). On the minus side, SAV may encourage more bullet voting than does AV. In party-list systems, SAV apportions seats to parties according to the Jefferson/d'Hondt method with a quota constraint, which favors large parties and gives an incentive to smaller parties to coordinate their policies and forge alliances, even before an election, that reflect their supporters' coalitional preferences.