The Hidden Constitutional Danger of Approval Voting

Approval voting sounds like common sense. Instead of being forced to pick just one candidate, you can check the box for every candidate you find acceptable. The one with the most approvals wins. No more wasted votes. No more strategic voting. No more negative campaigning that drives people toward the lesser of two evils. Places like Fargo, North Dakota, and St. Louis, Missouri, have already adopted it. Several state Democratic parties use it for internal contests. Prominent reformers and academics champion it as a cure for polarization.

But I want to slow this train down and ask a question nobody in the pro-reform movement seems willing to entertain: What does approval voting do to the constitutional architecture of the American republic? The answer is unsettling. What looks like a technical tweak to election mechanics is actually a quiet erosion of the very structures the Founders built to protect liberty from transient majorities, factional passion, and administrative overreach. This is not a partisan critique. It is a first-principles critique, rooted in the same constitutional wisdom that gave us the most durable system of self-government in human history.

The Madisonian Filter

James Madison, in Federalist Number 10, identified the central problem of republican government: the mischiefs of faction. You cannot eliminate factions without destroying liberty, so the question becomes how to control their effects. Madison's answer was structural. The Constitution establishes a system of representation that filters raw popular sentiment through multiple layers: the House's frequent elections, the Senate's longer terms originally appointed by state legislatures, the Electoral College, the separation of powers itself. Each layer adds a degree of deliberation, a check on momentary majorities, a forcing function that makes majorities prove their depth and durability.

The traditional single-vote system, where you choose one candidate, is part of that filtering architecture. Why? Because it forces a choice with consequences. When you vote for one candidate, you are saying: this person I am willing to stand behind. This person I claim as my representative. This person's victory or defeat will be tied to my decision. That forced choice creates accountability. The winner knows exactly which coalition put them in office. The loser knows exactly what they need to change to win next time.

Approval voting removes that friction. You can approve of five candidates, or ten, or everyone except the one you hate most. Your ballot becomes a vague expression of tolerance rather than a clear assertion of preference. The candidate who wins may be nobody's first choice but everybody's acceptable fifth option. That is not consensus. That is the lowest common denominator, and it is fundamentally at odds with the republican principle that consent of the governed should be meaningful, not milquetoast.

Consider what happened in Fargo's first approval voting election for city commission in 2020. The top vote-getter received about 38 percent approval. To put that in perspective, 62 percent of voters did not approve of the winner. Under a traditional system, that candidate would have needed to earn a plurality of single votes, a much higher bar. The approval system diluted the signal. The winner had no clear mandate, no identifiable coalition. That is not an improvement. It is a degradation of electoral accountability.

The Knowledge Problem and the Illusion of Mandate

Friedrich Hayek gave us the concept of the knowledge problem, the insight that no central planner can aggregate the dispersed, local, tacit knowledge that free individuals possess. The same principle applies to voting systems. When you ask voters to approve multiple candidates, you are implicitly asking them to make comparative judgments across a much wider field, judgments they may not have the information or inclination to make thoughtfully.

The voter who checks boxes for three candidates may be saying: I enthusiastically support Candidate A, I can live with Candidate B, and I guess Candidate C is okay compared to the alternatives. Or they may be saying: I do not know much about any of them, but I will check everyone except the one I dislike. The ballot cannot distinguish between these meanings. The aggregate approval number becomes a black box, a data point that looks precise but is actually ambiguous.

Henry Hazlitt, in Economics in One Lesson, taught us to look at the unseen effects of any policy. The seen effect of approval voting is that more people can express themselves. The unseen effect is the destruction of electoral mandates that every representative needs to govern effectively. A governor elected with 58 percent of the vote under a traditional system has a clear coalition to answer to. A governor elected with 72 percent approval under approval voting may actually have less legitimacy, because that 72 percent includes voters who held their noses and checked his box alongside three opponents. The mandate is an illusion.

And here is where it becomes truly dangerous. The illusion of broad consensus can be used to justify expansive government. The reformer says, look, 72 percent of voters approved of this candidate, they clearly want action. But they do not. They merely found him acceptable. The system inflates apparent support while deflating genuine accountability.

The Regulatory Ratchet

There is a constitutional concern that I have not seen discussed anywhere in the approval voting literature, and it deserves serious attention. Approval voting is more complex than pick one. That complexity creates an opening for administrative creep.

Who designs the ballot? Who decides which candidates qualify for approval consideration? When a voter makes an ambiguous mark, is that a check or a stray pen stroke, who adjudicates? Under a simple plurality system, these questions are mostly settled by tradition and clear statute. Under approval voting, every election becomes an opportunity for the administrative state to insert itself deeper into the electoral process.

Consider the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Passed with good intentions after the Florida recount debacle, it created a federal bureaucracy over election administration that the Constitution left to the states. Today, the Election Assistance Commission issues guidelines, mandates voting system standards, and effectively controls how states run elections. The federal government's role in elections has expanded far beyond what the Founders envisioned. Approval voting would accelerate this trend, because the more complex the system, the more expertise is needed to run it. And expertise, in a regulatory state, means power.

Justice Antonin Scalia famously argued for textualism and originalism in constitutional interpretation because the text of the Constitution provides a fixed anchor against judicial and bureaucratic discretion. The same principle applies to election mechanics. The simpler the system, the harder it is for administrators to manipulate. The more complex the system, the more room for interpretation, discretion, and inevitably, abuse.

The Real Problem

The reformers who champion approval voting are sincere and well-intentioned. But as Thomas Sowell has reminded us throughout his career, good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. The real problem with American politics is not that we cannot express nuanced preferences at the ballot box. It is that we have abandoned constitutional limits on federal power. It is that the administrative state makes law without representation. It is that the judiciary has become a super-legislature. It is that our culture has lost the virtues necessary for self-government.

When government is limited, elections are less fraught. When the Constitution is honored, the stakes of any single election are lower because most decisions are made at the state and local level, or not made by government at all. Approval voting treats the symptom, polarized, negative campaigns, while ignoring the disease: a federal government that touches every aspect of life, making every election feel like an existential struggle.

The Founders did not design a system to make everyone happy. They designed a system to protect liberty. They understood that friction, accountability, and clear choices were features, not bugs. Before we embrace approval voting as a cure, we should ask ourselves a question that cuts to the heart of our constitutional order. Does it make us more free, or does it just make our chains more comfortable?

I know what Madison would say. I know what Hayek would say. I know what Sowell would say. And I think, if we are honest, we know the answer too.