>seppley: Without studying details of the three Romanian candidates and the >voters' preferences, the explanation of this majority cycle cannot be known for sure.
--Indeed, it's very hard for me to understand it without knowing Romanian, and even if I did, it'd still be hard. >However, consider a case of three very similar candidates. The voters' preferences in each of the three possible pairings would be nearly tied (approximately 50% preferring each candidate over each other candidate). In such a case, a cycle involving three small majorities would not be rare. Almost an even bet? --actually this is basically exactly what happens in the "random election model" and no, it then is not an even bet; it is 8.78% probability you get a cycle. Gilbaud's number. Somewhat discussed in the paper http://rangevoting.org/Romania2009.html --the paper is now updated, I got confirmation and denial of the validity of certain poll results, and found approval- and range-voting-style polls. It seems Oprescu would have won with either approval or range voting. Oprescu or Antonescu would have won with the good pairwise-table-based Condorcet methods. Geoana would have won with asset voting. Basescu won with plurality and plurality+top2runoff, the official methods. With IRV, it is unclear who would win among {A,B,G}. It looks like 99.9% confidence there is a Condorcet cycle involving both B & G. However, it is unclear whether there is no Condorcet winner, or whether it is Antonescu. That is because the A-vs-G and A-vs-O pairwise results, are the least understood and least clear. If any of you have some Romanian friends who can offer some insight or point to some more poll data that maybe I missed, that'd be appreciated. Also, higher-accuracy versions of the poll data I already have, would be appreciated too. AN IMPORTANT QUESTION I DO NOT UNDERSTAND: The Romanian voters residing in foreign countries constituted about 1.4% of the total voter pool and heavily favored B over G (whereas the ones residing in Romania were split 50-50 between B & G). It would be good if we knew how these expatriates would have felt about all the other pairwise comparisons amongst {A,B,G,O}. It is thought that this was because a lot of them are in Moldova and B has loudly supported rights of Moldovan Romanians to get Romanian citizenship. What were the stances of A,G, and O on this issue, I wonder? -- 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
