On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 01:11:16PM -0500, Dale Sheldon wrote: > I feel (again, this is MHO), that the Condorcet criteria is a very > important one for an election method to satisfy; most point-based methods > (and instant runoff voting and plurality voting) don't meet it. The trick > with Condorcet is that it isn't complete: Condorcet alone only tells us, in > this election, that Martian Gunslingers shouldn't win; it can't decide > among the others. It was a VERY close election. Ranked pairs is a > so-called "Condorcet completion" method, a tie-breaker if you will, that > tries to pick its way through the sticky minefield of a Condorcet "circular > ambiguity"; at that point, the only gurantee is that a lot of voters will > be pissed off ;) Might it be preferable to just allow a "tie" situation when there's a circular ambiguity? I'm inclined to agree that an election method which doesn't yield the Condorcet equilibrium is probably not answering the question we want to ask.
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