On Nov 25, 2008, at 12:08 PM, Markus Schulze wrote:
Dear Greg,
you wrote (25 Nov 2008):
While complete ballot data is ideal, I think a convincing
case as to how a voting method might perform in a particular
election can sometimes be made from polling data. For example,
there's good exit polling data for the Senate race in Minnesota
that's being recounted, showing that supporters of the
Independence party candidate would have preferred Al Franken
over Norm Coleman by a 5% margin. That would have given Franken
at least another 20,000 votes, way more than the 215 votes he
trailed by pre-recount. I think that's a pretty good case that
IRV would have selected Franken, regardless of the results of
the plurality recount.
Then what do you say about the opinion polls that said that
Bayrou was a clear Condorcet winner in the 2007 French
presidential elections (although IRV would have chosen
Sarkozy)?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_2007#Before_first_round_of_vote
We don't actually know who IRV would have chosen, since the polling
(and the campaign) didn't happen in the context of an IRV election.
It's not an unreasonable conjecture that Bayrou would have gotten a
larger percentage of first choices (some from Sarkozy and Royal) under
IRV. Nor do we know how the smaller party votes would have transferred.
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