On Aug 28, 2010, at 12:11 PM, Michael Rouse wrote:
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.
so up is down, black is white, and plurality isn't plurality?
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
i am very aware of the overvote thing in the Florida 2000 election.
the overvotes that i am concerned about are those where the voter
marked the box for a candidate and then wrote in the very same
candidate's name in the Write-In slot. according to Florida law that
vote should be counted upon manual recount (and a manual recount
should ensue when the margin is less than 0.25% and 537 votes out of 5
million easily satisfies that) because the intent of the voter is
clear, and then Al Gore won that election by 170 (according to the
media recount) and history would be far different (and better). i am
still convinced that that election was stolen, particularly after the
Bush v. Gore decision of 12/12/2000.
all this has nothing to do with the fact that voters don't like
forsaking their favorite candidate and will be less likely to mark a
ballot in such a way as to harm their favorite candidate. with either
score or approval vote, you may harm you favorite candidate by non-
zero scoring (or approving) any other candidate.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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