[ShredKazoo]

You said AMA, but you also said you were trying to relax during winter break... so no need to bother with this question if you don't want, I guess.

I admit I do have one reservation about supporting approval voting. Specifically, I'm concerned about the "chicken dilemma" situation.

An advantage of plurality is that voters are strongly incentivized to tell pollsters their true favorite, in order to get their true favorite performing better in the polls and attract strategic voters. This means polls tend to track election results, which seems good for legitimacy. Additionally, adding polls to the mix means plurality isn't quite as bad as people say -- in theory I could support my true favorite in the poll, and shift to strategic voting in the general election if my true favorite doesn't see their polling numbers rise.

Approval voting seems like it could incentivize people to lie to pollsters though. Consider an election with a red-orange candidate, a yellow-orange candidate, and a blue candidate. Suppose all candidates have approximately equal levels of support. Imagine I support red-orange and I get a call from a pollster. I know that if I can get those who favor yellow-orange to vote for red-orange as well, red-orange has an excellent shot to win. So I lie, and tell the pollster I'm voting for blue only. The yellow-orange supporters start freaking out, and they vote for both red-orange and yellow-orange to keep blue out of office. I bullet vote for red-orange; red-orange wins in an upset where blue was the favorite. Blue supporters get angry, and declare the election a fraud, since the polls were so far off.

Have you guys thought about the added strategic dimension that polling adds?

[ShredKazoo]

Another important piece of the puzzle here is that politicians commonly update their positions in response to polls. (E.g. "politician X saw a drop in their polls after they said Y") So if polls become unreliable, that is potentially a big loss.