and i don't quite get whether a bunch of people bullet voted in the
Burlington IRV elections has much to do with the Approval or Score.
some people chose to bullet vote on the ranked-order ballot in the two
IRV elections we had in Burlington VT. that bullet voting was not
necessary (or should not have been necessary) in order to prevent harm
to their favorite candidate, assuming that was the candidate they bulleted.
on the other hand, Approval and Score *does* potentially harm your
favorite unless you bullet your favorite. if a large component of
people bullet vote their favorite in Approval or Score, the outcome of
the election is not any different than it would be for Plurality.
I think Approval is limited in some ways, particularly how it
"externalizes strategy" in my terms (moves strategy out of the method
itself, thus it is able to pass a lot of criteria that it might not if
everybody strategized). However, hurting your favorite doesn't seem to
be one of the problems of Approval.
Consider this. If you vote for the lesser of the two evils (according to
poll data), then you can't possibly harm this lesser of two evils if you
also approve all the candidates that you prefer to him. The only thing
that can do is shift the election *away* from the lesser evil onto
someone you like better. Therefore, if you're going to bullet-vote, you
can at least vote for those you prefer to the candidate in question.
That leaves the option of bullet-voting for your favorite. In what case
could voting for someone lesser than your favorite hurt you? That could
happen in the case where there are multiple candidates and all are
relatively strong. Say that you have Nader, Gore, and Bush, but this is
an alternate reality where Nader is rather strong (perhaps because of
Approval voting). Then if all the Nader-votes err towards safety and say
{Nader+Gore}, Nader is not going to win, because Gore will get at least
as many votes as Nader; but if that is the case, polls will show Gore to
be even stronger and thus the Nader-voters know to vote Nader alone.
Thus it would seem to me that you only need to bullet-vote when your
favorite is strong. Otherwise you can vote for your favored "strong"
candidate and all candidates you prefer to him. The need for this poll
data is, in my opinion, a problem of Approval (and makes the
consideration of honest Approval a bit of a distraction), but it is
better than Plurality - you only have to bullet-vote if the situation is
already very different than in Plurality, not all the time as Plurality
forces you to.
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