Condorcet method: Difference between revisions

In this election, Nashville is the Condorcet winner (Nashville beats Memphis 58 to 42, and Chattanooga and Knoxville 68 to 32) and thus the winner under all possible Condorcet methods.

It's possible to modify Score to be more like a traditional Condorcet method by allowing voters to write the scores they would give to every possible pair of candidates in a Score runoff, and then using a Condorcet method to process this, treating a score of, say, A5 B3 (where the max score is 5) as 0.4 votes for A>B. As this would be utterly infeasible with just a few candidates running however, one way to accomplish most of the same objective is to allow voters to mark on their ballots that they want their vote strategically optimized, meaning that if their cardinally expressed preferences are A5 B3 Z2, instead of having their vote considered as B3 Z2 in an B vs. Z runoff, it would be considered as B5 Z0 (if the max score is 5), which is functionally equivalent to the Plurality voting runoffs that are used for the traditional Condorcet winner definition. This strategic optimization can be done fractionally to allow a voter to customize how much optimization they want to be done with their scores in each runoff. It is also possible for voters to indicate an approval threshold, meaning that for all approved candidates, no strategic optimization is applied to pairwise matchups between them, but all pairwise matchups between approved and disapproved candidates are strategically optimized. With this modification, if all voters use strategic optimization, Score becomes a traditional Condorcet method (which will need a cycle resolution method to be applied at times), but if no voters strategically optimize, it remains Score (which never needs cycle resolution methods to be applied).