Approval Voting - Methodology
In Approval Voting, voters approve of any number of candidates by marking their names on a ballot. The winners are the candidates with the most tallied votes (aka the plurality winner).
In the example above, it shows that a voter has an unlimited amount of votes to distribute as they wish. The voter could not vote at all, or vote for all 5 candidates. Here, they chose their two most preferred candidates. So, John Citizen and Mary Hill win the election.
In this example, we are asked to identify the three winners using the multiple-winner approval voting method. There are five candidates: A, B, C, D, & E. The numbers 6, 3, 8, 9, & 4 represent the votes each candidate can receive. The Y and N stand for either approval or disproval of a candidate. There are thirty total voters who cast their votes for the five candidates, three of who will win. For every Y a candidate receives, they receive that amount of votes tallied into their overall score. So, Candidate A receives 6 "Y", so 6 votes are tallied into their overall score of 13, along with 3 and 4. The three candidates with the highest amount of votes are D, E, and B, as their scores are 23, 16, and 15 respectively. So, these three candidates are the "winners" of the election.