[EM] The Frequency of Condorcet Winners in Real Non-Political Elections

[Andrew Myers]

Here is a paper I recently presented at the 61st Public Choice Society 
Conference <https://publicchoicesociety.org/conference/2024>, containing 
results from analysis of tens of thousands of polls run on the CIVS 
system since 2003.

The Frequency of Condorcet Winners in Real Non-Political Elections 
<https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civs24/>

Andrew C. Myers

Condorcet-consistent voting is attractive because it follows the 
principle that the will of a majority of voters should not be denied. 
However, it is in general possible that there is no Condorcet winner: a 
cycle of candidates might exist in which each candidate is preferred to 
the next. The possibility that such a cycle occurs, and the uncertainty 
about how to handle it, have been an obstacle to the adoption of 
Condorcet methods. This paper reports on the experience from CIVS, a 
long-running open-source voting service that supports 
Condorcet-consistent voting methods. Over a period of about twenty 
years, users have conducted tens of thousands of polls using CIVS, 
including many with real-world consequences. During this time, CIVS has 
thus accumulated probably the largest existing corpus of data about how 
Condorcet voting functions in practice. CIVS supports multiple 
completion methods for handling cycles, but the data show that it 
usually does not matter which completion method is used, because there 
is rarely a cycle in polls with a large enough number of voters.

Full text here: <https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civs24/> 
<https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civs24/>

Cheers,

-- Andrew



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