[EM] voter comprehension level of score, approval, and IRV (exit polls)

[Warren D Smith]

Re range=score voting.  In a France 2007 range & approval voting exit
poll study, paper
by them in English had claimed
  83.5% said "yes" to "does the principle of approval voting seem
clear to you?" while 89.2% said yes for same question about
range(0,1,2) voting.

Looking at their French ultra-long paper
   http://rangevoting.org/FrenchApproval2007long.pdf
Question 5 & 6 in the questionnaire on p.222
addressed how clear the voter found score voting & approval voting respectively,
but you are warned that when they actually discuss the resulting
answers on pages
257-259 they call them Q6 and Q7.
  Anyhow, the results were
VERDICT.............................SCORE VOTING.........APPROVAL
yes, clear.....................................78.6%.......................66.9%
slightly clear (un peu).....................10.6.........................16.6
slightly unclear (plutot non)..............3.3............................6.5
no, unclear......................................6.1...........................7.9
(no opinion)......................................1.5...........................2.0

They were not asked about their race, age, education level, first language.

----

Comparing with instant runoff based on this exit poll in San Francisco:
   http://archive.fairvote.org/media/irv/SFSU-PRIRCVFinalReport.pdf
= http://RangeVoting.org/SFSU-PRIRCVFinalReport.pdf

Table 9. Overall Understanding of RCV (N = 1633)
Understood it perfectly well........51.6%
Understood it fairly well.............35.6%
Did not understand it entirely......9.9%
Did not understand it at all.........3.0%

But for "less than HS" education level 23.8%
"did not understand entirely or did not understand at all"
and 21.9% for Chinese as 1st language, which were the two worst numbers.
Best was Spanish as 1st language (.0%) and post-grad education (10.0%).

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SUMMARY:

So combining both exit poll studies

SCORE VOTING no or slight understanding: 7.6%
APPROVAL VOTING....................................9.9%
RANKED CHOICE.......................................12.9%

Score voting understanding by everybody was better than even
post-grad educated San Franciscans' understanding of RCV.


-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)