[EM] inaccurate Fargo approval voting results

[Toby Pereira]

 I'm not completely convinced by this. I doubt most potential candidates are experts in voting method theory, and if there has been a low rate of empirical pathologies, then they won't know about it from real-life elections either. I don't see any reason why "moderate" candidates (presumably those in the centre) will automatically get fewer first place votes than the "extreme" candidates in any case. Most people won't know of the practical differences between Condorcet and IRV, so if the Condorcet winner is almost always elected under IRV anyway, I don't see that it will affect candidate behaviour that much.
Toby
    On Sunday 9 June 2024 at 18:50:26 BST, Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 The reason IRV looks like it "basically works" is because its pathologies mean moderate and third-party candidates know they have no hope of winning, so they never run in the first place. At that point, in a 2-party system, all voting systems will return the same results (because it's just a simple majority vote).

I think this bears repeating: a low rate of empirical pathologies is often a negative, not positive, indicator. If your dataset has no examples of center-squeeze, that means your system is so bad at electing Condorcet winners that moderate candidates are refusing to run in the first place. Similarly, we'll know Condorcet methods are working if (sincere) Condorcet cycles start popping up all the time. That's how we'll know we've successfully depolarized our politics and broken free of the old one-dimensional political spectrum (where the median voter theorem protects us from cycles).

  
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