An honest vote in first-past-the-post, say for your awesome friend Bob for President, would give you approximately 0% return compared to the proper strategy of voting for the lesser evil of Clinton.
Suppose Approval Voting gives you a utility ("happiness") of 10 if you're tactical, or 9 if you're honest.
Now suppose Voting System X, in which a sincere and tactical vote are obviously identical (ignore the fact that this requires the system to use randomness), gives you a utility of 7.
Now do you _really_ want to take the latter system because there's no disparity in your happiness based on whether you knew the best strategy? Or would you rather take the system that gives you a better result?
More details here. www.electology.org/topic/tactical-voting
Obviously, if the honest approval ballot give me 9 utility points, and the strategy approval ballot gives me 10 utility points that's better then the system that always give me 7 utility points.
However, it seems to me that the situation is much more along the lines that an honest approval vote gives me 2 utility points, and a strategic one gives me a utility of 9.
See, I hold to political positions that almost always put me in the minority. If I only approved those candidates that that I actually liked, I'd only approve candidates with effectively zero chance of winning. This would let my least favorite candidate win, thus granting me very little utility.
Hence, I'll probably take System X, even if approval voting might, in theory, do better if everyone applied the strategy correctly.
No, it's not. I agree with you. (But perhaps didn't express that right.)
Explained here with a simple graphic to visualize it. www.electology.org/topic/tactical-voting
