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A philosophical treatise

Why approval voting?

A dangerously overwrought defense of checkboxes, featuring political scientists who would probably prefer you use their system for picking a president, not a pho place.

Abstract. Approval voting — where each voter ticks every option they find acceptable and the option with the most ticks wins — is demonstrably more expressive than plurality, more robust than ranked-choice, and immune to most classes of strategic manipulation. Nobel laureates have written about it.[3] Academic handbooks have been bound.[4] Cities have adopted it.[5] We at Wherely are pleased to bring this machinery to bear on the question of where to get lunch.

1. Introduction

In 1978, Steven Brams and Peter Fishburn published the paper that kicked off the modern academic interest in approval voting.[1] It remains, by most serious measures, one of the most elegant voting systems ever formalized. In 2026, we decided to use it to help you pick between Chipotle and Ramen Ya.

We make no apology for this.

2. What's wrong with just picking your favorite?

The default group-decision system — everyone names their favorite, highest vote count wins — is called plurality voting. It's the system most people imagine when they imagine voting. It is also, from a social-choice-theory perspective, one of the worst systems ever devised.[7]

Plurality punishes expressiveness. If six of you would happily eat at three different sushi spots, but you each name a different one, a single voter who "just wants tacos" will win. This is the vote-splitting problem, and it's why your friend Kevin keeps getting his way.

Approval voting solves this at its root: you don't pick one favorite, you tick every option you'd actually be willing to eat. The sushi coalition's preferences stop canceling each other out, Kevin's tacos have to earn broader support, and democracy — of a sort — prevails.

3. What's wrong with ranked-choice?

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) asks each voter to order the options from most to least preferred, then eliminates the lowest-scoring option and redistributes its votes until someone has a majority. It is elegant, it is popular, and it is, for our purposes, wildly overengineered.

Consider: you are on the sidewalk. You have 47 seconds before Bob asks "so are we doing this or what." You do not have time to construct a total ordering over {Chipotle, Ramen Ya, Bao Bao, Sweetgreen, the place with the weird sign}. You have time to tick three boxes. Approval voting is RCV with the cognitive load deleted.

Also: Kenneth Arrow proved in 1950 that no ranked system can satisfy all the "reasonable" fairness criteria simultaneously.[3] Approval voting sidesteps this theorem by simply not being a ranked system. If you find that unsporting, take it up with Arrow.

4. Isn't approval voting "gameable"?

Every voting system with more than one possible outcome is, technically, gameable. This is the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.[6] The interesting question is how much a given system rewards strategy over honesty.

In approval voting, the optimal strategy is: "approve your favorite, and also approve anything else you'd genuinely accept." This is also, remarkably, what a non-strategic honest person would do. The incentives and the honest answer point in the same direction. This is rare and worth noticing.

Weber's 1995 analysis found that under standard assumptions, approval voting elects a Condorcet winner — the option that would beat every other option in a head-to-head matchup — whenever one exists.[2] This is a strong property. Your lunch probably doesn't rise to it. Don't worry about it.

5. So why is Wherely the ideal use case?

Approval voting shines precisely when:

  • The stakes are low-to-moderate. Nobody's going to war over tapas.
  • The option set is small and enumerable. You can list the places. You cannot list every possible Supreme Court justice.
  • Voters have genuine preferences but low tolerance for ceremony. Nobody wants to rank 6 burrito shops.
  • The outcome needs to be tolerable to everyone, not maximally preferred by someone. A place 5/6 people approve of beats a place 2/6 people love.
  • Decisions happen in real time. The organizer closes the poll when people are hungry, not at 8pm on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November.

This is, essentially, a specification of "picking a place to eat with your friends." Which is to say: approval voting was basically invented for us. The political scientists just didn't know it yet.

6. Where approval voting is not ideal

In the spirit of intellectual honesty:

  • High-stakes single-winner elections with tight margins, where rank intensity really matters.
  • Decisions where the minority's intensity should sometimes override the majority's indifference. (Approval voting is, by design, tyranny of the tolerant.)
  • Picking a president of the United States.

A reminder from the management

You are not electing the president of the United States.

You are picking where to get dinner. Or which park to meet at. Or which movie to put on. The stakes are that your friend Dave will be mildly grumpy for forty minutes if the wrong option wins. Dave will be fine.

It does not have to be perfect. It has to be done, and it has to be tolerable. Approval voting is very good at those two things.

7. Conclusion

We have cited seven papers across sixty years of social-choice theory to justify a user interface in which you tap some boxes. We regret nothing.

Now close this tab and go decide where to have lunch.

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References

  1. [1]Brams, S. J., & Fishburn, P. C. (1978). "Approval Voting." American Political Science Review 72(3): 831-847. The founding paper. Still banger. Still not about lunch.
  2. [2]Weber, R. J. (1995). "Approval Voting." Journal of Economic Perspectives 9(1): 39-49. Weber politely notes that under standard rationality assumptions, approval voting elects a Condorcet winner when one exists. Your lunch group may not be standard or rational.
  3. [3]Arrow, K. J. (1950). "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare." Journal of Political Economy 58(4): 328-346. Arrow's impossibility theorem proves that no ranked voting system can satisfy all reasonable fairness criteria at once. Approval voting evades this by not being ranked — it trades information ("how much do you prefer A to B?") for simplicity. A tradeoff you make every time you order off a menu without first constructing a total preference order over appetizers.
  4. [4]Laslier, J.-F., & Sanver, M. R. (eds.) (2010). Handbook on Approval Voting. Springer. 412 pages. Do not read before deciding where to get tacos.
  5. [5]See e.g. Fargo, ND (approval voting adopted 2018, repealed 2022); St. Louis, MO (approval voting, still in use as of writing). Neither city has, to our knowledge, used approval voting to pick a lunch spot. Their loss.
  6. [6]Gibbard, A. (1973). "Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result." Econometrica 41(4): 587-601. Every non-dictatorial voting system can be manipulated by strategic voting. Approval voting's strategic vote is "approve your favorite AND anything you'd tolerate," which is… exactly what you were going to do anyway. This is part of why people like it.
  7. [7]Merrill, S. (1984). "A Comparison of Efficiency of Multicandidate Electoral Systems." American Journal of Political Science 28(1): 23-48. Merrill's simulations found approval voting's social-utility efficiency is generally within a few percentage points of the theoretical optimum, beating plurality and runoff. Whether Chipotle is 3% better than Sweetgreen is left as an exercise.