[EM] First Condorcet cycle ever spotted in a national presidential election (!?! apparently)

[Warren Smith]

Hello.

It appears the Romanian 2009 presidential election, which just (allegedly) ended
with Basescu winning re-election, involved two different Condorcet
top-cycles involving
4 candidates.
The winner Basescu (elected via plurality+top2runoff) unfortunately
probably was the worst choice among the four (based on both pairwise
table based on numerous pairwise polls and the official results; and
also on an approval-style poll; I am unaware of any range-voting-style
poll).
Runoff-style voting (and plurality voting too -- Basescu won the 1st
round) both severely distorted democracy in this election and also
both elected probably the worst winner among the 4.

More details will be found at this post:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RangeVoting/message/12804
which summarizes other recent posts on that same bulletin board
and one on the election science foundation bulletin board.

I hopefully will write this observation up in the form of yet another
CRV web page...
you may want to inform me of more data and news.  The cycles are not
"strong" ones
(i.e. they failed to have large margins in each pairwise election)
but they look strong enough to have a high probability they genuinely existed.
That will have to be evaluated, but since there actually are TWO cycles it seems
the confidence at least one was real, is pretty good.

Need to sleep now :)

-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html