[EM] the "bullet voting" bogeyman for range/approval voting

[Michael Rouse]

  The "degenerate to plurality voting" concern is easy to disprove -- 
even/ plurality/ doesn't degenerate to pure plurality voting, because in 
every plurality election there are overvotes.

In fact, in the infamous Florida debacle of 2000, *there were more 
overvotes than people who voted for Ralph Nader *-- 111,251 overvotes 
versus about 97,000 for Nader (it's sadly amusing to see people complain 
about Nader being in the race while ignoring an even bigger issue). In 
other words,  people /accidentally/ cast an Approval ballot more often 
than they /purposely/ voted for the "spoiler." I can't imagine any 
scenario where there would be /fewer/ Approval ballots, if they were 
counted instead of being tossed out.

Here's a USAToday link of Florida overvotes in 2000: 
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2001-05-10-overvotetable.htm

Michael Rouse



On 8/28/2010 7:56 AM, Warren Smith wrote:
> The idea has been raised (mainly by instant runoff proponents at FairVote
> and based apparently intense intuition but zero evidence)
> that approval or range voting will in practice degenerate to plurality voting.
>
> Preliminary indications, based on evidence, are that this is not so:
>      http://rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html
>
> However the amount of evidence presented there, is not all that large.
> I believe one can get more data...  but I haven't yet.  Suggest some more?
> [In particular, I am looking for some IRV elections for which we have
> full ballot data,
> in which vote-truncation was allowed, with
>    * 8 candidates
>    * 17 candidates
> and several thousand or more voters, and reasonably important, to compare
> with some approval voting elections.  Suggest?]
>
>

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