On the face of it it seems weird that votes for one thing can be influenced by the existence of unrelated issues on the same ballot. It makes more sense if you

On the face of it it seems weird that votes for one thing can be influenced by the existence of unrelated issues on the same ballot. It makes more sense if you're making a selection among many people for one position, but if you have, say, 5 different issues on a ballot, you can influence the impact of those 5 by adding useless issues to the ballot. (e.g., if you are a pink legislator you can feign partisanship and add a bunch of low-importance purple issues to the ballot so that purple voters cannot easily oppose your pink issue).