Approval Voting for Special Elections

Hawaii recently conducted a special election where voters had to choose from 44 (!) candidates. In Texas, the Lubbock area is facing an upcoming special election which may feature 8 or 9 candidates. In general, special elections have low barriers to entry for candidates and no opportunity for political parties to conduct a primary in order to reduce the field. This combination of circumstances strains most election systems, but Approval Voting handles it easily without concerns about vote splitting or other election anomalies that can prevent the most acceptable candidate from winning.

Today special elections only work at all because the media can conduct polling and do other work to anoint the front-runners and help voters understand which candidates are "viable". Of course usually these efforts revolve not around polls or measurements of actual voter support, but instead revolve around finding out which candidates have raised the most money. But this process is severely flawed. It can overlook candidates with broad-based appeal, but little to offer to the special interests who can bring in the most campaign dollars.

Currently special elections are fairly rare, but this may be changing. Some politicians are being pressured to resign from office at times where a special election would result. This can allow special interests more control over the selection of their replacements and give those hand-picked replacements the advantages of incumbency. For this reason it is important that special elections be just as difficult to win as an open seat election. Approval Voting will help make that happen.