Approval Balloting for Fixed-Size Committees

Approval voting is a well-known voting procedure for single-winner elections. Voters approve as many candidates as they like; a candidate wins if and only if no other candidate receives more approvals (Brams and Fishburn 1978, 1983, 2005). But approval votes can be aggregated in different ways to serve different purposes, so it is reasonable to distinguish between approval balloting, in which each voter submits a ballot that identifies the voter’s approved candidates, and approval voting, the single-winner procedure that selects the most-approved candidate(s) (Merrill and Nagel 1987).