[EM] Re: [Condorcet] Copeland's criteria

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 06:44 PM 9/11/2005, Kevin Venzke wrote:
>I thought about this a bit. Consider this election:
>
>49 A
>24 B>E
>27 C>D>B>E
>
>C has 3 wins, and is the only Copeland winner.

Let's look at this. C is not just the Copeland winner, C is the 
Condorcet winner, because in all the pairwise elections, A has 49 
votes, and *all the other candidates* have 51 votes, because all the 
other candidates' voters ranked A last by truncating. Eliminate A, 
and C obviously has more votes than B.

So exactly who would Mr. Venzke have win this election? Looks to me 
like the electorate is (1) polarized very badly, and no election 
method is going to produce really good results with such an 
electorate, and (2) A majority of voters preferred "anybody but A."

If it is not A, then who should it be? Obviously, C.

As to violated criteria, I will note that "election criteria" are 
typically characteristics of elections that, on the face, usually 
seem to be sensible and necessary. This can be incorrect.... This is 
why such criteria should be considered carefully. The only methods 
that I have seen that don't violate *some* criterion incorporate a 
deliberative process and thus don't fully qualify as "election 
methods" which normally are expected to mechanically produce a winner 
from the votes.