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> The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates. I can see why that would be a useful ass

> The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates. I can see why that would be a useful assumption, but is there really empirical evidence to confirm that? A much bigger factor in determining what the voter does, I would guess, is whether they hear activists for their party telling them (perhaps disingenuously) that their candidate won't win if you "betray" them by approving your second or third preference. So there will be probability distributions of parties that try spreading such a message, and people who hear such a message, and voters who are loyal enough or risk averse enough to follow the advice, but I don't think the combined distribution matches closely enough to the genuine "degree of preference". As a result, some candidates will get a tactical boost at the expense of their rivals, and eventually all voters will start to question whether they should have voted differently.

naniwaduni 4y ago
It's not a fantastic proxy, I agree, since the aggregation rule implicitly assumes linearity and it's almost certainly not. I think it's somewhat mitigated in practice by the kind of small intersection between situations where it's strategically safe for a party to push bullet voting and where it's useful to do so being pretty constrained to elections where the top candidates are mostly acceptable to the same voters, though? I find it pretty unintuitive to construct an approval vote election scenario with a rational spoiler effect, and that's probably less big a deal than the vote weighting issues that crop up with multi-point score votes, but that's definitely something you can quibble over. The wider point imo is that compared to all forms of ranked choice voting, arbitrary-precision score voting is pretty obviously night-and-day superior (information-content-wise, at least), to which approval voting is a "close enough", at worst moderately inferior but at least theoretically equivalent, trade-off in favor of implementability.

naniwaduni 4y ago

It's not a fantastic proxy, I agree, since the aggregation rule implicitly assumes linearity and it's almost certainly not. I think it's somewhat mitigated in practice by the kind of small intersection between situations where it's strategically safe for a party to push bullet voting and where it's useful to do so being pretty constrained to elections where the top candidates are mostly acceptable to the same voters, though? I find it pretty unintuitive to construct an approval vote election scenario with a rational spoiler effect, and that's probably less big a deal than the vote weighting issues that crop up with multi-point score votes, but that's definitely something you can quibble over. The wider point imo is that compared to all forms of ranked choice voting, arbitrary-precision score voting is pretty obviously night-and-day superior (information-content-wise, at least), to which approval voting is a "close enough", at worst moderately inferior but at least theoretically equivalent, trade-off in favor of implementability.