An analysis of the 1992 U.S. presidential election between Clinton, Bush & Perot suggested the voters' preferences were a majority cycle: Bush over Clinton, Perot over Bush, and Clinton over Perot. If true, the recent Romanian election was not the first majority cycle in a national presidential election.
The analysis was by a professor of political science at UC San Diego. I don't recall his name... maybe Gary Jacobson? His poll numbers indicated the smallest of the three majorities was Bush over Clinton. That means Clinton would presumably have won given a voting method like MAM (which gives precedence to larger majorities when constructing the order of finish). (Some pundits claimed Perot was a spoiler and that Bush should have won. They either didn't understand that in a majority cycle *each* candidate is in a sense a spoiler, or understood but chose to mislead the public in order to undermine Clinton's presidency.) Regards, Steve Eppley ----------------------- Warren Smith wrote: > Hello. > > It appears the Romanian 2009 presidential election, which just (allegedly) > ended with Basescu winning re-election, involved two different Condorcet > top-cycles involving 4 candidates. > The winner Basescu (elected via plurality+top2runoff) unfortunately > probably was the worst choice among the four (based on both pairwise > table based on numerous pairwise polls and the official results; and > also on an approval-style poll; I am unaware of any range-voting-style > poll). > Runoff-style voting (and plurality voting too -- Basescu won the 1st > round) both severely distorted democracy in this election and also > both elected probably the worst winner among the 4. > > More details will be found at this post: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RangeVoting/message/12804 > which summarizes other recent posts on that same bulletin board > and one on the election science foundation bulletin board. > > I hopefully will write this observation up in the form of yet another > CRV web page... you may want to inform me of more data and news. The > cycles are not "strong" ones > (i.e. they failed to have large margins in each pairwise election) > but they look strong enough to have a high probability they genuinely > existed. > That will have to be evaluated, but since there actually are TWO cycles it > seems the confidence at least one was real, is pretty good. > > Need to sleep now :) > -- > Warren D. Smith > http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking > "endorse" as 1st step) > and > math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
