Approval Voting for Nonpartisan Elections

Nonpartisan elections do not have the advantage of political primaries to winnow the field. Thus the list of candidates can be long and there is nothing to aid the voters such as a party label to help them when casting their votes.

Approval Voting is particularly useful in this case for many of the same reasons that it is useful in primaries. It allows voters who are concerned about particularly bad or unappealing candidates to select a variety of acceptable candidates instead. This makes it unlikely that a candidate that is unacceptable to a majority of the voters can emerge from the pack and win due to vote splitting. Approval Voting performs this feat without the aid of an expensive runoff that forces the voters back to the polls for a second round of voting.