On Jan 21, 2010, at 1:03 AM, Juho wrote:

> What is good in all the common Condorcet methods is that their 
> vulnerabilities to strategies (and their differences in general) may very 
> well be so small in typical real elections (large, public, with independent 
> voter decision making, with changing opinions and less than perfect poll 
> information) that strategic voting will not be a problem. Also their 
> differences with sincere votes (e.g. spoiler related problems) are quite 
> small in real life elections.
> 
> Here's one simple spoiler related example as a response to Kathy Dopp's 
> request.
> 
> 35: A>B>C
> 33: B>C>A
> 32: C>A>B
> 
> I this example there are three candidates in a top level cycle. If any of the 
> candidates would not run that would mean that there is a Condorcet winner, 
> and that winner would be different in each case. Let's say that the method we 
> use will pick A as the winner. If B would not run then the votes would be 35: 
> A>C, 33: C>A, 32: C>A and C would win. B is thus a spoiler from C's point of 
> view.
> 
> I note however that these spoiler cases in Condorcet are not as common as in 
> many of the other methods. In practice it may be that there is no need to 
> worry about these cases. Maybe Kathy Dopp's comparisons will reveal something 
> about how problematic the spoiler effect is or is not in Condorcet. Not also 
> that in the example above B was not a minor party candidate (often term 
> spoiler refers to minor candidates) but a pretty strong candidate.

In that case it might be a good starting point to define "spoiler", so we know 
what we've found when we find it.

What's an example of an IRV spoiler who's not a "pretty strong candidate"?
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