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[Warren Smith]

>and i don't quite get whether a bunch of people bullet voted in the
Burlington IRV elections has much to do with the Approval or Score.
all's i think about that is either they really only preferred one
candidate and all of the rest were equally bad.  or, out of spite,
they were saying to themselves "I hate IRV.  I'm gonna vote only for
my guy, goddammit.  Then I'm gonna bitch about how my vote didn't
count if my candidate is eliminated before the final round."  it was,
to me, interesting about how some of the most rabid IRV opponents here
in Burlington were prog-hating Democrats.  those bullet voters are the
only ones (among the big 3) who can claim that they were left outa the
final round.  it's a bogus argument, in my opinion.  they could have
thought about it and made up their minds about the Prog v. GOP by
election day, rather than demand the convenience of not having to make
that decision until 3 weeks later.

--it is hard for me even to follow this stream-of-consciousness
postmodern literature type discussion, much less reply to it.

*If you are an IRV proponent: your arguments (if any) that IRV is
better than approval voting because with the latter voters will
"bullet vote" ... are bogus.  The evidence does not support you.
FairVote did not produce any evidence. In fact if anything the
evidence I compiled refutes that.

*If you couldn't care less about IRV, but are for some reason worried about the
bullet-voting bugaboo for approval/range voting: well...  now you know
there is no evidence said bugaboo is worse with approval/range voting
than it is with IRV.

*If you are babbling about "spite" and "prog-hating Democrats" and so forth
in a mysterious manner:   well, why the heck should anybody care?  I don't.
Maybe they are bullet voting out of "spite." Or because they've
"seen god."  Or they are "tired of it all."  Or they're "rabid." Or
they have a "weird animus." Who knows?  I DON'T CARE WHY THEY ARE
DOING IT.  I offered no hypotheses on that question.  I do not accuse
them of rabies or anything else.
I merely compiled the data, and found out there was less bullet voting
with approval than with comparable IRV elections. I therefore
conclude, that any claim there is something specially worrying about
approval voting which makes it vulnerable to bullets... is baseless.

If you want to dispute me on that, here is my suggestion:
 find some evidence.

I'm working on finding some more evidence myself, and see no reason
you should not help.

-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html