[EM] Center for Range Voting Formed

[Abd ulRahman Lomax]

At 08:25 PM 8/11/2005, Rob Lanphier wrote:
>However, the Condorcet winner criterion is quite easily and
>unambiguously applied to Range Voting ballots, since a ranked ballot can
>be easily derived from a Range Voting ballot.

What do you do with candidates with equal ratings?

>In fact, the Condorcet winner criterion has nothing to do with the
>ballots, and everything to do with the electorate.  You only need to
>answer the question "if head-to-head elections are conducted among all
>of the candidates, is there a candidate that wins every election they
>are part of?"  Given that its possible to derive the electorate's intent
>from a set of Range Voting ballots, it's hard to argue that there's
>ambiguity there.

However, Rob is correct. If we neglect equal rankings for the moment, Range 
quite clearly fails the Condorcet criterion, which could just as easily be 
seen as a weakness of the Condorcet method as one of the Range method.

I previously argued that election methods students should be careful about 
the language used. "fail" is a loaded term which implies inferiority, even 
though its technical usage simply means that a method does not produce the 
result that the criterion would predict. That "failed" result might be 
superior.