>Juho Laatu: I think Range Voting is quite ok for opinion polls and corresponding fully non-contentious elections (e.g. www.imdb.com), but as soon as there is an element of competition Approval style voting is the likely outcome.
--the exit poll we made of the 2004 US Presidential election, showed only about 20% of voters going with approval-style range votes. Clay Shentrup just made another exit poll for the 2006 TX governor election, http://rangevoting.org/Beaumont.html and the approval-style votes received were even rarer. So Juho Laatu is massively wrong based on this evidence. His defense will doubtless be, no matter how many thousands of exits polls and pollees we do, that any exit poll is not the real thing, i.e. does not actually affect the election, and therefore, magically, if we suddenly made it real, everybody's behavior would massively change. Of course, I have no way to refute that until or unless range voting is actually adopted. However, these exit poll results are extremely clear, large, and undebatable as such. Warren D Smith http://rangevoting.org <-- add your endorsement ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
