I concur with Adam. Once you support ranking, unless you've heard of Condorcet the runoff idea makes intuitive sense, since plenty of places in the US use 2-stage runoff. The question is how to sell Condorcet over IRV.
My original message was prompted by an argument with a very intelligent person who heard of an election in Ireland where IRV happened to find the centrist. She concluded (justifiably) that if France had used IRV instead of two-stage runoff the final round would likely have had at least one liberal or moderate rather than two conservatives. A liberal vs. a conservative may or may not be as good as a centrist vs. one of those, but it offers more freedom of choice than conservative vs. ultra-conservative. I tried Hitler-Stalin-Washington on her (not those names, but that idea) but she pointed to the Irish example. She is very intelligent. However, take the intuitive notion of runoffs and combine it with an anecdote of a very good result under IRV, and even a very intelligent person like my fellow student will be difficult to persuade. (It probably doesn't help that I'm a Libertarian and hence I frequently clash with her on politics. If people don't like the messenger the message will fall on deaf ears. Hence it's important for people from different third parties to collaborate when selling Approval or Condorcet.) I tried summability, thinking that an engineer would appreciate the difference between exponential scaling and n^2 scaling. She didn't care. I said that the Condorcet candidate is by definition the one whom the electorate prefers. She said "Well, it seemed to work pretty well in Ireland." Any thoughts on how to overcome the tag-team combo of IRV's seemingly intuitive nature and IRV anecdotes? I'm sure CVD is collecting such stories. Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
