Talk:Condorcet criterion
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What's the origin of the name Condorcet? Ben Finn 14:13, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
The link to "minmax" goes to the wrong article.
[edit] First past the post
The following statements are taken from this article:
"The Condorcet candidate or Condorcet winner of an election is the candidate who, when compared in turn with each of the other candidates, is preferred over the other candidate."
"Non-ranking methods such as plurality and approval cannot comply with the Condorcet criterion because they do not allow each voter to fully specify their preferences."
In a FPTP/plurality system, the voter specifies their preference for one candidate. The FPTP winner therefore has more votes than each other candidate in turn.
Therefore, on face value, FPTP does have condorcet winners - the second above statement is false. If it is assumed that there will always be an element of tactical voting and we therefore cannot see who the voter really would have voted for absent tactics, then this article should state this. The second statement above, however, states that FPTP does not allow each voter to fully specify their preference - and at face value this statement is false: there is one candidate to be elected, and the elector is allowed to vote for one candidate.
This article needs a re-write so that it says what is means to say, but at the moment it is a nonsense.
A further question arises, separate from the above points, in that if one is allowed to say that FPTP is not condorcet due to the tactical voting issue, then no voting system can be condorcet. Even if a specifies from 1 to 10 their order of preference of a candidate list with 10 people, then that voter still may be voting tactically. Therefore there can never be a strict logical criterion of condorcety, although it is of course possible to devise such a criterion is one introduces subjective areas of greyness in the definition.
Thoughts ?--jrleighton 04:23, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
- I believe this article originally comes from electionmethods.org's wording. This wording refers to sincere preferences (not voted preferences) in order to ensure that FPP and Approval fail. Usually, I think, it is better to not discuss sincere preferences, and simply try to analyze all methods as though they are rank ballot methods. For FPP this is easy. For other methods (for instance, a Condorcet method on a three-slot ballot) some more complicated reasoning has to be introduced. KVenzke 23:58, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
