At 08:25 PM 8/11/2005, Rob Lanphier wrote:
However, the Condorcet winner criterion is quite easily and unambiguously applied to Range Voting ballots, since a ranked ballot can be easily derived from a Range Voting ballot.
What do you do with candidates with equal ratings?
In fact, the Condorcet winner criterion has nothing to do with the ballots, and everything to do with the electorate. You only need to answer the question "if head-to-head elections are conducted among all of the candidates, is there a candidate that wins every election they are part of?" Given that its possible to derive the electorate's intent from a set of Range Voting ballots, it's hard to argue that there's ambiguity there.
However, Rob is correct. If we neglect equal rankings for the moment, Range quite clearly fails the Condorcet criterion, which could just as easily be seen as a weakness of the Condorcet method as one of the Range method.
I previously argued that election methods students should be careful about the language used. "fail" is a loaded term which implies inferiority, even though its technical usage simply means that a method does not produce the result that the criterion would predict. That "failed" result might be superior.
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