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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