Anti-plurality voting describes a voting method in which each voter votes against a single candidate, and the candidate with the fewest votes against wins. Anti-plurality voting is an example of a positional voting method.
Contents
Imagine that Tennessee is having an election on the location of its capital. The population of Tennessee is concentrated around its four major cities, which are spread throughout the state. For this example, suppose that the entire electorate lives in these four cities and that everyone wants to live as near to the capital as possible.
The candidates for the capital are:
The preferences of the voters would be divided like this:
In this voting system, each voter would mark a vote against his or her fourth preference. In this case, it would be a tie between Nashville and Chattanooga, both receiving zero votes.
Characteristics
As can be seen from the example, in the absence of tactical voting, this system tends to favor middle-of-the-road candidates. However, it is very sensitive to tactical voting, as any candidate perceived beforehand as a potential winner will attract more countervotes from partisans of their opponents. This creates the paradoxical situation for the candidates that, in order to win, you need to appear not to be winning. For this reason, few would advocate this system for general high-stakes use, though for its simplicity it can be useful in specific situations (where voters are not motivated to use tactical voting).
Voting method criteria evaluation
APV satisfies the monotonicity criterion, the participation criterion and the consistency criterion. It does not satisfy the Condorcet loser criterion, the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, the independence of clones criterion or reversal symmetry.