I want you to take a look at this Google Trend, particularly the breakdown by cities (bottom, center).
Minneapolis and San Francisco, which have both passed instant runoff laws in the last few years, have practically zero people who have looked into approval voting. But on the plus side, in Los Angeles, which is slowly examining IRV, even though IRV is more-often searched for, approval is still getting a noticeable number of hits. And in New York City, which has also begun considering IRV, approval voting has actually caught more people's interest than IRV has.
It's hard work, but it seems that the word is getting out. Please, do your part, especially if you're in LA or NYC. Unfortunately, score voting/range voting have no noticeable activity in any city; but keep talking about approval voting, because people are starting to listen!
You're right that every little bit helps. And I think approval is a nice intermediary step before range voting.
ReplyDeleteYour Google trend URL is wrong. When you use the right one, you see a different story. :(
ReplyDeleteOdd; clicking on my link works for me, and clicking on yours gives me nothing but the trend main-page. Hmm.
ReplyDeleteOh wait; I see what you were trying to do; quotes around the search terms (which plays havoc with the link when pasted in.)
ReplyDeleteThere's still a blip in California... but yeah, the NYC and LA marks fall off completely.
But I get the same results if I search for "approval voting" with or without quotation marks; same for "instant runoff voting", so why would the trends be so different?
::shrug::
...apparently a lot of people are searching for "voting approval"? Since putting the query in quotation marks just forces the order.
ReplyDeleteWeird.
If only NY City would consider approval.
ReplyDeleteIts a shame that people drink the IRV kool-aid.
At least with approval voting the voters would benefit plus they wouldn't have the twisty turnie pretzel algorithm of IRV that sorts, resorts, eliminates and reallocates votes.