@hubert @ben i think the way to think about it isn’t some threshold, but generosity. you have a candidate you prefer, others you really dislike, others you don’t dislike do much. you can, if you like, “bullet vote” — approve only of your most preferred candidate. if everyone does this the exercise degenerates to FTPT. but everyone doesn’t! 1/

@hubert @ben people who choose more are extending an olive leaf. they are saying, it doesn’t have to be my way or the highway, here are one or more others i can live with. 2/

@hubert @ben these “olive leaf” voters become the swing coalition, the group that decides whether and how results vary from what an FTPT election might have yielded. 3/

@hubert @ben some of these “olive leaf” differences will be mere self-expression. if you would have voted strategically in FPTP for a major party candidate despite preferring a less likely contender, you get to express that. within the context of one election, it changes nothing, but it does change perceptions of who might be credible next time around. 4/

@hubert @ben and when next time comes, when there are in fact multiple credible candidates rather than the FPTP binary equilibrium, these olive leaves are crucial. the credible candidates who win the checkmark of democratic generosity from voters who might prefer someone else, but can live with them, become victors. 5/

@hubert @ben from the candidate side, to win you have to elicit this generosity from people whom you know would prefer, if they were to rank, someone else. that changes how politics is done. trying to destroy someone’s idol is unlikely to call forth this kind of good will. /fin