An aside - Plurality is not broken - it does EXACTLY what it was designed
to do. Problem is that those of us who bother to think about it want
something else.
I suppose if what you say it was designed to do is "select the plurality winner", well yeah, it does what it was designed to do. But that is rather obvious and redundant.
If you say it was designed to, say, "select a reasonable candidate", I stand by my statement that it is broken.
BUT, I do not understand your words about parties - Plurality pushes
toward two strong parties while Condorcet gives parties enough visibility
that more might thrive.
In some ways I think the term "party" is not a very good term. Of course, people will always gather together to advance various causes or candidates, and that is great.
I am referring to a more specific thing, which is the phenomena whereby people incur strategic advantage by gathering together prior to an election and deciding among themselves which candidate they wish to advance, so as to avoid splitting the vote.
I think this is the number one reason for parties in the US. Parties would still exist in the absense of a system susceptible to vote splitting, but I don't think they would be highly polarized in the way they are today, nor would they be as powerful and so dominate government. Also, I think they would tend to concentrate more on specific causes (for instance, a "pro-choice" party or what have you), rather than on choosing and then advancing candidates.
Your mention of IRV makes me wonder what you are thinking of:
My mention of IRV simply was saying that IRV, like condorcet, does not produce output that is easy to grasp by average joes. I don't in any way propose mixing IRV in.
Condorcet with something else mixed in, such as Approval - too
complex - leave this as a challenge to those wanting such.
Yeah. Yuk.
The rest of your post seemed to be explaining to me what the pairwise matrix is all about, and I already know all that. I think you kind of missed the point of what I am after. I want something that gives a single score per candidate. The pairwise matrix would still exist, but somewhere between the pairwise matrix and the final selection of a single candidate, I want an intermediate result with one score per candidate. Apparantly MinMax does this, but it might not be as good a method as others, as well as producing scores that would need some normalization prior to displaying as, say, a bar graph (i.e. the best score is zero or possibly a negative number, with no clear "theoretical worst score"). Still, it is in the direction I am going.
-rob
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