As a PR, I think I handled D1 well: there were exactly 2 wagons, one on me and one on the other person, they died instead of me, and my PR was of greater utility than theirs could ever be. The only reason math was hammered is because scum got in my way, and they paid the price. The way EoD1 would've gone is: math claims, people back off, people go for me, I redirect them to another wagon, we 1v1 me and that wagon, then we exile that wagon (even if I have to claim in the process). Saying there was a better thing for me to do is having the hindsight (and math's flip) that I couldn't have in EoD1.
It's not "having the hindsight" when I said
in the post immediately following mathdude's partial claim that actually, he really needed to full-claim and we needed to give people the chance to counterclaim him. You were the one who jumped to the incorrect conclusion that he was trying to counterclaim
your PR and made the traitor accusation as a panicked response. If you'd had the patience to let him claim his role, you would have seen there wasn't a reason to immediately accuse him. The deadline was not even very imminent at that point, and one of the reasons your wagon was at 5 votes was that people who didn't want to exile mathdude (e.g. Robz) were voting for you in opposition. I think there's every chance that scum would have diverted public opinion onto a VT (or other town PR?) instead of you as the mathdude wagon waned, particularly because I think scum is quite happy to keep you alive looking scummy.
With that out of the way, I'm sure we can agree that voting ash and voting me are 2 very different things? I'm claiming a PR and I have no real counterclaims, ash is executing a plan, something he said D1 that he would rather not be known for, this is much more consistent with scum!ash. Unless you think he can be Vig? If so, why?
No, as I said, I think your vig claim makes the most sense, particularly because I do think you'd be carrying exactly the sort of bias you exhibited with assuming that mathdude was going to claim vig just because you're vig, and I don't think mafia!you or traitor!you would have been quite so primed to do that.
My equating you and Ash is simply that I think both of you are doing anti-town things in the intention of doing something good for town that is simultaneously quite selfish in the way that it tends to concentrate the power and information into a small number of hands (yours or Ash's). In your case, that's lying to town about thinking mathdude was the traitor, and generally posting even more noise and half-baked theories in-thread than usual in an attempt to look less townie so you're not on scum's radar. In Ash's case, it's making a big bold role claim that's almost certainly a lie to town, but probably gives him some advantage, like surviving longer in the game and getting better PoE or something. You may well both be town, but both of those things involve misleading other townies, and other townies are generally a bit miffed about being misled, so I think it's fully reasonable to want to put down a policy vote against either of you.
I mean, sure, maybe Ash is just scum looking to make the game interesting, in which case it's undeniably pro-town to vote for him, but actually I kind of lean against that just because we really do see this kind of stuff from town!ash, nice though it would be to have a simple scum!ash case to trust in.