I've been trying to post the following for days. The eskimo.com site has been bouncing a lot of my messages this last week with "unknown mailer error 14". ----------------------- The Condorcet tallying algorithm takes so much time that a computer is needed to tally large elections. The time is roughly proportional to .5 tVC(C-1)) where t is the time it takes to tally one pairing of one voter (around a millisecond on a fast PC, I'd guess, and falling), V is the number of voters, and C is the number of candidates. Okay, computers are cheap so Condorcet's method is more viable now than it was in the Marquis' century. It's also possible to use parallel processing if necessary, since the voters' ballots can easily be divvied up. (The CxC matrices can be added together at the end.) What about calculating the Smith set? Is this time negligible in comparison to tallying all the pairings? What's a good algorithm? I presume it's much quicker than the pairwise tallies, since it's independent of the number of voters, but I want to doublecheck. --Steve