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'''Q: ([[User:RobLa]]) - So you knew about Condorcet winners before the 2009 election? How well did you understand electoral methods before 2009?'''
'''A: (Robert) - ''' - Before 2009, I remember reading a good article in Scientific American by Partha Dasgupta and Nobel laureate Eric Maskin ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ranking-candidates-more-accurate/ ) where the authors dub Condorcet rank-order voting as "True Majority Rule". I realized that the IRV rules were not the same as the naive Condorcet rules, but I could tell that if the CW gets into the IRV final round, the Condorcet Winner (CW) will win IRV. So I wasn't worried. In fact, later, the paper ''Risk-limiting Audits for Nonplurality Elections'' by Sawarte et. al. ( https://hovav.net/ucsd/dist/irv.pdf ) has shown, in Table 1, results that all of these other IRV elections, including Burlington 2006, ended up electing the CW. Only Burlington 2009 failed to elect the CW and my feeling about that is exactly the same as regarding the Electoral College in the U.S. The Electoral College does a pretty good job of electing the popular vote winner, except when it doesn't. And when it fails to elect the popular vote winner, the elected President '''never''' has voter legitimacy and is handicapped in their role in office. Similarly, when IRV fails to elect the CW, the elected IRV winner will '''never''' carry the voter legitimacy that the CW would simply because more of us voted for the CW.
=== Question #4: The 2010 Repeal ===
'''Q: ([[User:RobLa]]) - With your math background and having read about Condorcet, you had a bit of head start on your fellow Burlington citizens when it comes to understanding the difference between a Condorcet winner and an IRV winner. When voters repealed IRV in 2010, do you feel like they were doing it because they understood that distinction, or was the 2010 repeal of IRV more of a referendum on Bob Kiss's performance in office?'''
== References and footnotes ==
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