[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 87, Issue 54

[James Gilmour]

Ralph Suter  > Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2011 3:12 AM
> 1. Despite your own certainty about how "the real world of partisan 
> politics" functions, your opinion is entirely speculative  with no basis 
> in historical events, since no Condorcet elections have ever been held 
> in any major public elections (or even any minor ones I am aware of).

You are right, so far as I am aware  -  there have never been any Condorcet public elections anywhere in the world.  That in itself
should tell us something as the Condorcet voting system has been known since 1785.

We do, however, have some preferential vote elections in Scotland (local government).  Both in the multi-winner (3 or 4) elections
and in the single-winner by-elections the winners after the transfers of votes are commonly those who had most first preference
votes  -  that should be no surprise.  But when a lower placed candidate comes through on vote transfers to win a by-election, there
are always some howls from the anti-reform parties.  There is no great public outcry about this here because we do not directly
elect anyone into a really powerful single-person office.


> 2. In arriving at your conclusions, you have neglected two critically 
> important considerations.
> 
>    a. A so-called "weak Condorcet winner" could, immediately following 
> an election, make strong and possibly widely persuasive arguments that 
> she/he not only deserves to have won but is the strongest possible 
> winner, one who in separate contests with every other candidate would 
> defeat every one - or, in the event there was a cycle that had to be 
> resolved, would still have credible claim to be stronger overall than 
> any other candidate. She/he could then quickly move beyond such 
> arguments to act in ways that demonstrate her or his actual political 
> strength beyond any reasonable doubt. The early carpers about the 
> candidate being a weak winner would soon be forced to shift focus to 
> other more important issues. If you want to seriously address practical 
> politics, you need to address this highly credible 
> post-election scenario.

I follow your argument,  but I wonder how well a directly-elected President of the USA would be managing right now if that President
was a weak Condorcet winner, with say only 5% of the first preference votes in a 3-candidate contest.


>    b. Your arguments, weak though they are, are even less applicable (if 
> at all) to  elections of legislators than to elections of officials in 
> executive offices (president, mayor, etc). In fact, in a sharply divided 
> electorate (whether divided on ideological, religious, ethnic, or other 
> grounds), most people would likely prefer a middle-ground compromise 
> winner (even one from a small minority party or group) than one from the 
> major opposing party or group they strongly disliked, since the 
> middle-ground winner would, though far from ideal to most voters, also 
> make far less objectionable legislative decisions overall than a 
> "stronger" but widely disliked major party winner.

All legislators (federal House of Representatives, federal Senate, State legislatures, and city, town and county councils) should
all be elected by some system of proportional representation to ensure proper representation of the voters.  Discussion about weak
Condorcet winners should be of no relevance to such elections because none on the members of those "representative assemblies"
should be elected by single-winner voting systems.  Much more of political benefit could have been achieved if some of the
considerable effort expended on the near-insoluble problems of obtaining (and measuring) the "best representation" in single-winner
elections had been directed to that more practical objective.

James Gilmour