[EM] Bad Condorcet winners?

[Bart Ingles]

Tom Ruen wrote:
> 
> I've also met a number of people, who when I talked about IRV, they were
> deathly afraid it would have allowed Nader to win the presidency. IRV never
> helps a weak middle win, but Condorcet will. It actually took me a while to
> convince my cousin that he actually preferred Bush to Nader second. He
> assumed he would somehow be forced to vote Nader second.
> 
> Well, this shows that in a Condorcet election voters must take lower
> preferences more seriously than in IRV.


Here's my basic "bad Condorcet" example (actually a low-utility
Condorcet example).  It doesn't seem particularly implausible to me, but
requires that utility include a non-policy component.  For example, the
middle candidate could be a centrist but unpopular for other reasons.

In the following example, voter ratings are used to show an
approximation of utility.  Candidates A, B, and C are voter-rated on a
scale of from 0-10, with 10 being the voter's favorite, and 0 the least
favorite:

Votes             Candidate (rating)
-----     ---------------------------------
 49%       A(10)                 B(1)  C(0)
  3%       B(10)  A(9)                 C(0)
 48%       C(10)                 B(1)  A(0)

Without trying to make too much of the average or aggregate voter
ratings, it seems obvious that 97% of the voters despise candidate B,
even though B is the Condorcet winner.

Bart