Title was: Approval voting = delegation voting. Turned out to be not the case...
I changed the title because
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=6249.msg83622#msg83622--------------
With the possibility for delegate-operators to have as many delegates as they want don't we have delegation voting (= your voting power is distributed among all the delegates you vote for) and not real approval voting effectively?
For example (with approval voting): I want to have the full effect of my voting stake, so I have to vote for 101 delegates. If I only know and trust 5 delegates then I would have to vote for 25 delegates of each of the 5 delegate operators.
This would be the same as distributing your vote among 5 delegates if we had delegation voting.
On the other side approval voting gives the shareholder, that is not educated that his vote only has the full effect when he votes for 101 delegates, the impression that he is supposed to vote only for a few delegates. He doesn't see a reasons to vote for 20 delegates (as he doesn't know the system/ approval voting) and might think voting for 25 delegates might be a bit too much power for one delegate. The result is low effective participation in voting even if all shareholders voted but just for a hand full of delegates.
So effectively (if you know how the voting system works) approval voting and delegation voting is the same.
If people don't understand the voting system fully then we have the following contra points for the two systems:
Approval voting: Low effective participation
Delegation voting as opposed to wrong assumptions about approval voting: Having to play whack-a-mole with bad stake; bad stake can cause trouble.
In reality both voting systems are the same if delegate operators can set up as many delegates as they want.
An attacker probably understands the voting system better than the average shareholder, so we give him an advantage with approval voting.
This was a quick though I had after the mumble session. There might be a flaw in there but up to now I couldn't think of one.