Per Wikipedia, the answer to your first question is “no, that isn’t how approval voting works if used for multi-party elections.”
Approval voting is almost never used for multi-winner elections
If it is, there is some sort of complex vote-counting system to allow minority party candidates to be elected.
My personal solution to the voting system dillema is candidate directed instant runoff:
Each voter selects one candidate
The candidate with the least votes transfers all of thier votes to another candidate of thier choice (this could be pre-specified, or decided after the vote totals are known, and could be public or private)
Repeat step 2 until one candidate has over 50% of the vote.
This is just a variation of asset voting. I like it too. I could see an argument that you should start by redistributing the votes from the people who are guaranteed enough votes for a seat, because that could change elimination order. There are a bunch of different heuristics you could use.
Thanks for sharing the official name. Personally, I don’t like the idea of “negotiations” (as noted: this is rough for single winner elections), and would advocate for some sort of deterministic reallocation based on pre-election decisions. That is, each candidate sends thier instant runoff ordering to the election commission, before any votes are counted. There could still be negotiations then, but the voters would know if centrist candidate C was going to roll thier votes rightward or leftward, and could decide who to support in light of that.
Per Wikipedia, the answer to your first question is “no, that isn’t how approval voting works if used for multi-party elections.”
Approval voting is almost never used for multi-winner elections
If it is, there is some sort of complex vote-counting system to allow minority party candidates to be elected.
My personal solution to the voting system dillema is candidate directed instant runoff:
Each voter selects one candidate
The candidate with the least votes transfers all of thier votes to another candidate of thier choice (this could be pre-specified, or decided after the vote totals are known, and could be public or private)
Repeat step 2 until one candidate has over 50% of the vote.
This is just a variation of asset voting. I like it too. I could see an argument that you should start by redistributing the votes from the people who are guaranteed enough votes for a seat, because that could change elimination order. There are a bunch of different heuristics you could use.
Thanks for sharing the official name. Personally, I don’t like the idea of “negotiations” (as noted: this is rough for single winner elections), and would advocate for some sort of deterministic reallocation based on pre-election decisions. That is, each candidate sends thier instant runoff ordering to the election commission, before any votes are counted. There could still be negotiations then, but the voters would know if centrist candidate C was going to roll thier votes rightward or leftward, and could decide who to support in light of that.