Apology accepted.

Voting "no" would have been the equivalent in this case of "no change." Abstention means "I am not able to take a reasoned position."

Presumably many people voted yes or no without understanding what they were voting for, on the principle that if the City Council recommended it, it must be a good idea (or a bad idea). These proposals, by the way, were nonpartisan in that they weren't associated with any particular party: voters were simply being asked to ratify or thwart actions the Council itself had voted to take.

Of course we often make decisions based on feelings, intuition, wild guesses, etc. But I wouldn't consider those processes "alternatives to science" because science is a methodical and ultimately self-correcting way of understanding the world. Intuition, wild guesses, etc., aren't either methodical or part of a viable approach to general understanding. (They can be made systematic, however, though not very useful to understanding, by being combined into a mythology.)