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?] -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info