I do believe in the power of gut feelings. I do agree that razor-edge voting decisions can and should be made by gut feelings (better to trust your own decisions in a democracy than to let third parties dictate your ballot to you).
However... Although this discussion is full of affirmations that citizens not versed in election theory can still make good decisions, overall the suggestion of "toss a coin, and go with your gut if you don't like it" is probably a little insulting to most people. More to the point, imagine that we had a strong public campaign for Approval Voting: The people from the "our system is the best in the world, don't invite chaos by changing it" school (most elected officials, and most pundits in service to the Republicrats) would mock Approval Voting as "Coin Toss Voting" were we to put this forward as a reasonable strategy for "average citizens." Then again, I'm the guy who wanted to build a big machine that tells people what's best for them when marking ballots..... ;) Speaking of public campaigns for Approval Voting: I did some looking around and never found any hints that recent Russian elections use AV. Some time next week I'll call the Russian consulate to ask about their elections. Otherwise, it looks like my section of the proposed "White Paper" would be "Well, in the Communist era and Gorbachev era (before the attempted coup) the Russians used Approval Voting." Not very inspiring.... Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
