Approval voting is an electoral system in which voters can select many candidates instead of selecting only one candidate. Description Approval voting ballots show a list of the options of candidates running. Approval voting lets each voter indicate support for one or more candidates. Final tallies show how many votes each candidate received, and the winner is the candidate with the most support. Effect on elections Approval voting advocates Steven Brams and Dudley R. Herschbach predict that approval voting should increase voter participation, prevent minor-party candidates from being spoilers, and reduce negative campaigning. FairVote published a position paper arguing that approval voting has three flaws that undercut it as a method of voting and political vehicle (the group instead advocates for Instant-runoff voting). They argue that it can result in the defeat of a candidate who would win an absolute majority in a plurality election, can allow a candidate to win who might not win any support in a plurality election, and has incentives for tactical voting. The first two "flaws" are considered advantages by advocates of approval voting, as it chooses centrist candidates with broad appeal rather than polarizing candidates who appeal only to the majority. The Center for Election Science also points out that any voting method is subject to tactical voting with more than two candidates, as pointed out in Gibbard's theorem. One study showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) – it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin as the top two to proceed to a runoff. Le Pen lost by a very high margin in the runoff, 82.2% to 17.8%, a sign that the true top two had not been found. Straight approval voting without a runoff, from the study, still would have selected Chirac, but with an approval percentage of only 36.7%, compared to Jospin at 32.9%. Le Pen, in that study, would have received 25.1%. In the real primary election, the top three were Chirac, 19.9%, Le Pen, 16.9%, and Jospin, 16.2%. A study of various "evaluative voting" methods (approval voting and score voting) during the French presidential election, 2012 showed that "unifying" candidates tended to do better, and polarizing candidates did worse, via the evaluative voting methods than via the plurality system. A generalized version of the Burr dilemma applies to