Problems with Condorcet

[bartman]

While Condorcet-type elections favor a compromise candidates in a closed
setting such as a parliament (as favored in Roberts Rules) where
candidates are relatively well-known peers of the voters themselves,
Condorcet is not well suited for use in large public elections.  Given
the realities of political advertising and voter psychology, full
ranking can not be relied on to give meaningful enough results to
support pairwise counting.

For example, a vote which ranks a major candidate last may simply mean
that he is perceived as the greatest threat to the other major
candidate.  This is reinforced by negative advertising by major
candidates, who tend to demonize their main opponents while ignoring the
rest.  This does not necessarily mean he is an extremist or unqualified;
it may simply mean he is the second most popular. 

Middle-rankings are also suspect, since not all candidates are equally
well known.  A vote which ranks a candidate somewhere in the middle may
mean the candidate is an acceptable compromise, or it may simply mean he
is an unknown who is not perceived as a threat to a more favored
candidate.  Even if he is a reasonable compromise in one sense, he may
be an extremist in other areas.  He may also be otherwise unqualified
for some reason which could easily be overlooked, since a voter is not
likely to use the same care in selecting lower-ranked candidates that he
would use for his first choice.

If anyone wants to assert that the above scenarios will be rare
exceptions, I would like to see the arguement.  Personally, I would
suspect that these scenarios would be just as likely as not; the real
problem is that there is no way to predict one way or the other.  As a
result, the only rankings with relatively unambiguous meaning would be
the first, or possibly the first couple.  This may not matter much with
IRO, since the lowest rankings are the least likely to be used, but it
would render Condorcet the equivalent of pulling names out of a hat.

While limiting the number of rankings may rule out some aesthetically
"ideal" election methods, at least the remaining possibilities are
simpler to implement.  Besides, there are other (probably more
important) reasons to replace FPTP elections than the prospect of
occasionally electing a 3rd-party candidate.  These should be of major
concern to anyone interested in electing "compromise candidates".  Some
examples:

1)  When an FPTP vote is "spoiled", the winner is the candidate that the
3rd party voters would have voted *against* in a runoff (i.e. worst
possible outcome).

2)  In FPTP there is a tendency for centrist 3rd parties to push the
major parties away from the center by devaluing swing votes (in a
two-man race, swing votes are worth twice as much as "fringe" votes,
since in gaining a swing voter, the opponent loses the same voter, for a
net difference of two votes).  When a third candidate absorbs a large
number of centrist votes, the major candidates have less reason to
compete with each other for these votes and instead pay more attention
to extremist voters.  This is in addition to any shift of the major
candidates' bases of support due to displacement by the other parties.

Bart Ingles