[EM] [CES #3650] FairVote folks are not the friendliest bunch

[James Gilmour]

Jameson Quinn  > Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 2:00 AM
> If I'm right, the claim is that voters, and especially 
> politicians, are intuitively concerned with the possibility 
> of someone winning with broad but shallow support. In 
> Approval, Condorcet, Majority Judgment, or Range, a 
> relatively-unknown centrist could theoretically win a contest 
> against two high-profile ideologically-opposed candidates. 
> The theory is that the electorate would be so polarized that 
> everyone would explicitly prefer the centrist to the other 
> extreme, but because the voters don't really expect the 
> low-profile centrist to win, they might miss some important 
> flaw in the centrist which actually makes her a poor winner.

I cannot comment on the quoted remark (cut) that prompted your post and I know nothing at all about the activities of anyone at
FairVote, but you have hit on a real problem in practical politics in your comment above  -  the problem of the weak Condorcet
winner.  This is a very real political problem, in terms of selling the voting system to partisan politicians (who are opposed to
any reform) and to a sceptical public.

For example, with 3 candidates and 100 voters (ignoring irritant preferences) we could have:	
	35 A>C
	34 B>C
	31 C	
"C" is the Condorcet winner.  Despite the inevitable howls from FPTP supporters, I think we could sell such an outcome to the
electors.

But suppose the votes had been (again ignoring irrelevant preferences):
	48 A>C
	47 B>C
	 5 C	
"C" is still the Condorcet winner - no question about that.  But I doubt whether anyone could successfully sell such a result to the
electorate, at least, not here in the UK.

And I have severe doubts about how effective such a winner could be in office. Quite apart from the sceptical electorate, the
politicians of Party A and of Party B would be hounding such an office-holder daily.  And the media would be no help  -  they would
just pour fuel on the flames.  The result would be political chaos and totally ineffective government.

The flaw in IRV is that it can, sometimes, fail to elect the Condorcet winner.  But IRV avoids the "political" problem of the weak
Condorcet winner.  I suspect that's why IRV has been accepted for many public and semi-public elections despite the Condorcet flaw.

James Gilmour