> You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because

I'm actually trying to get you to apply the same scrutiny to ordinal systems as you are giving to cardinal systems. I actually appreciate that you are critical of cardinal systems but I don't appreciate that you aren't being as critical of ordinals (recognize I'm talking about at least a dozen voting systems here. We have to start here before we can enter the nuance of individual systems but we're not even clear here). To be a good scientist you need to detach yourself from your preference. You need to critique YOUR preference more than you critique the opposing options. You're smart and if you've picked the right system then you should be able to defend it. But if you're smart and picked the wrong thing then you need to change because it isn't about what you like, it is about what is right (I'll keep stressing that no voting system is optimal and we need to define our metrics -- I have stated mine -- but we're not discussing these, we're caught up on a single strategy which appears in both cardinal and ordinal and as far as I can tell you don't recognize the latter).

> But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close

Yes, and we need to think about how distant these candidates are from one another. Then ask yourself, can we compose a system where these candidates are similar? Is it always random and we have no control? Or are these candidates always distant and on opposite sides of the spectrum? You may be primed to believe the latter because that's the likely scenario in plurality voting but is this true for all systems? To answer this you need to have a deep understanding of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE), spoilers (both weak and strong -- aka favorite betrayer criteria), and how we embed preference (this is why I keep mentioning distances between candidates on the ballot. Note that this is a different distance/manifold than the previously mentioned one at the beginning of this paragraph).

> 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion

I agree it is a cop-out since we see lower bullet voting tendencies in cardinal systems. I agree that sample sizes are small but we do have lots of simulations. Unfortunately we have very little real world data. Unfortunately that means we need to advocate for these systems to get real world natural experiments. Fortunately there are a few approval systems: Fargo ND and St. Luis MS (also Latvia). So we are collecting some of this data and it is very promising so far. We also have non-political versions of this like HN itself! There is only a binary voting system here (until you reach a certain score, then we get range voting). So I'd also argue we have tons of data (also surveys frequently use disapprove/neutral/approve styles of voting. Yes, this is voting). We've seen substantial success with these and I think that's not something we can exclude (though we must be aware of things like vote inflation for certain services, like Uber, that don't exhibit in other services, like old Netflix rating or current ratings).

> I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.

Back to the embedding.

> I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it.

Let's say all things are equal in effectiveness. Approval is O(n) and RCV is O(n2). I think that's killer and matters a lot (see the main topic).

> Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation.

This is one of the few political topics I'm extremely passionate about so I enjoy discussing it. I do want to be clear in that my goal here is not necessarily to get you to come to the cardinal side (though that'd be nice) but I want you to understand that voting methods are extremely complex (lots of people want you to think they are simple) and we shouldn't have strong passions about them without putting significant time to learn (I think discussions can be good learning mechanisms fwiw). Also plenty of time before I'm going anywhere tonight. And you have not offended me in any way. I'm glad we had this conversation.

Happy New Years :)