[EM] Questions about Majority-Beat vs Plurality-Beat Condorcet

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2026-04-06 03:24, Joshua Boehme via Election-Methods wrote:

> Once you go down that rabbit hole, it gets harder to stand by 
> Condorcet / Smith as a strict requirement. Indeed, it's easy to 
> construct examples of elections -- not necessarily in these particular 
> cases -- where *every voter* prefers, say, a random ballot lottery to a 
> Condorcet winner

I think that's a problem inherent to ranked voting in general.

To take a simple example, with a center squeeze scenario like

40: L>C>R
30: R>C>L
20: C>R>L

the centrist candidate (C) could be be near-max utility for everybody; 
or near-min utility for everybody except the centrist-first voters. But 
a ranked method can't tell which is the case because either scenario 
produces the same set of ranked ballots.

Cardinal methods can theoretically tell them apart, but most that I know 
of are quite vulnerable to strategy in return, and (since they aren't 
based around vNM utilities) need to assume interpersonal comparability 
of some sort.

-km