I've discovered a professional article on voting theory which seems to confirm my argument (see <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/9057>) that the IRV is more likely to elect a Condorcet candidate when one exists (with sincere votes) than the two-stage runoff procedure (assuming that the preferences remain fixed from one stage to the next). Here is an excerpt from Table 1, page 6 (in this article, IRV is called the "Hare" method):
Table 1: Condorcet efficiencies for a random profile with 25 voters by Merrill (1984) procedure \ # alternatives 2 3 4 5 7 10 RUNOFF 100,0 96,2 90,1 83,6 73,5 61,3 HARE (TIES) 100,0 96,2 92,7 89,1 84,8 77,9 See pg 6 of the article: "Analysis of voting procedures in one-seat elections: Condorcet efficiency and Borda efficiency" DIMITRI VANDERCRUYSSEN (KUL)1 March 1999 <http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/vandercruyssen99analysis.html> That article notes that this "far-famed table" comes from an earlier article: Merrill, S., III (1984) �A Comparison of Efficiency of Multialternative Electoral Systems�, American Journal of Political Science, Vol 28, Issue 1, pp. 23-48. (available in the "JSTOR" academic database) Notice that, just as I surmised, the two methods start out equivalent with 2 or 3 candidates, and then the IRV does better and better than the 2-stage runoff as the number of candidates grows. Also, on a lighter note, this article cites this list in footnote 9 on page 6: 9 "We use the name �Baldwin� rule in order to stress the difference with the Nanson rule. John Taplin mentioned that name on the Election Methods Internet Site. The procedure may be better known as e.g. Nanson�s modification of his own rule (cf. McLean and Urken (1995)), but this terminology is confusing." ===== Richard M. Hare, 1919 - 2002, In Memoriam, http://www.petersingerlinks.com/hare.htm __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
