Warren,
You quoted:
1. condorcet.org definitions page:
"Name: Condorcet Criterion
Application: Ranked Ballots
Definition:
If an alternative pairwise beats every other alternative, this alternative must win the election.
Pass: Black, Borda-Elimination, Dodgson, Kemeny-Young, Minmax, Nanson (original), Pairwise-Elimination , Ranked Pairs, Schulze, Smith//Minmax, Sum of Defeats
Fail: Borda, Bucklin, Coombs, IRV"
And remarked:
(Note that, revealingly, they do not consider range voting or
plurality voting to either pass or fail.)
Maybe you missed "Application: Ranked Ballots". Blake Cretney doesn't
classify RV or plurality voting (aka FPP) as ranked-ballot methods.
He is referring only to methods that
reduce to FPP when there are two candidates, so there is no
ambiguity about his meaning of "pairwise beats".
For a method to meet the CC, it must allow the voters to express all
their pairwise (binary) preferences or in other words their full
ranking. That cuts out FPP, Approval and
limited-slot ballot methods with fewer available slots than there are
candidates. Then it must elect any candidate that pairwise beats all
the others. X pairwise beats Y if more
voters rank X above Y than vice versa. No ambiguity that I can see.
A Range Voting ballot with many more available slots than there are
candidates does allow the voter to give his/her full rankings. It can
be regarded as simply a ranked ballot
with some extra extraneous ratings information on it. But just because
RV uses this extra information, I don't see any need to
"generalize" the CC to accommodate it.
This no-hyperlink choice is in fact a plausible way to go because then the condorcet
criterion is about the logical self-consistency of a method, as opposed to the consistency
of method A as judged using method B, which is kind of an unfair pre-biased way to judge A.
Voting methods don't have any feelings or rights, so therefore this
alleged "unfairness" doesn't matter.
Chris Benham
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