On 9/22/11 2:37 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
2011/9/22 robert bristow-johnson <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>On 9/22/11 12:40 PM, James Gilmour wrote: I cannot comment on the quoted remark (cut) that prompted your post and I know nothing at all about the activities of anyone at FairVote, but you have hit on a real problem in practical politics in your comment above - the problem of the weak Condorcet winner. This is a very real political problem, in terms of selling the voting system to partisan politicians (who are opposed to any reform) and to a sceptical public. i remember Rob Ritchie arguing this case to me in 2009 (why "sometimes IRV is better than Condorcet"). For example, with 3 candidates and 100 voters (ignoring irritant preferences) we could have: 35 A>C 34 B>C 31 C "C" is the Condorcet winner. Despite the inevitable howls from FPTP supporters, I think we could sell such an outcome to the electors. But suppose the votes had been (again ignoring irrelevant preferences): 48 A>C 47 B>C 5 C "C" is still the Condorcet winner - no question about that. But I doubt whether anyone could successfully sell such a result to the electorate, at least, not here in the UK. even though there were 48 voters who preferred C over B, 47 that preferred C over A, along with the 5 that preferred C over both A and B. that does not appear to me to be such a bad result.That's debatable. It's possible that C did not get an appropriate level of scrutiny from the voters; that if they'd looked more closely, they would have found some serious flaw.
that is a different issue. vetting the candidates is an issue of having an effective press and also of the opposing camps and other political action groups. if there is a skeleton in C's closet, it should come out before the election whether Condorcet or FPTP is used.
but again, Jameson, consider the alternative: whenever you elect someone who is not the Condorcet winner (especially if the election method had a ranked-choice ballot, so there would be no question who the CW is), what you are doing is electing someone (A or B) when a majority of the electorate marked their ballot that they preferred some other specific candidate (namely C) over whomever you elected. that's a fundamental problem, if majority rule and one-person-one-vote are the axiomatic governing principles.
you can call C a "weak candidate", but i would call this simply a "close election". close elections often draw out pathologies. the typical pathology of a FPTP spoiled election (like Nader in 2000) can only happen when the election is close between the top two candidates (if Gore had a stronger lead over Bush, Nader wouldn't have made any difference). so to point to a close election and say that the winner is suspect is nothing new.
i do not see the closeness of the scenario above as a convincing argument that the single candidate who is preferred by a majority of voters to any other candidate propped up against him/her should not be elected to office in favor of one of those others so propped up. it's like Barrabas and Jesus; we hold up Candidates A and C and ask the electorate "whom do you choose? A or C?" and the electorate responds (with a slim majority), "C!". so should we ignore the electorate and elect A instead? this happens again with B and C and the electorate again responds with "C". *why* should either A or B be elected when that is the case?
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