In the EM presidential poll that we voted on in February and March of this year, Nader won the Approval count.
Nader was the only candidate to receive Approval votes from everyone who voted.
Nader pairwise-beat his 3 main Approval runners-up (Kucinich, Chomsky & Camejo), and probably everyone.
It seems reasonable to say that Nader is CW, till such time as someone names someone who pairwise-beat Nader. If that occurs, then the thing to do would be to find out if _that_ candidate is pairwise-beaten by any of hir main rivals in the Approval count. If not, then s/he is the tentative CW, till such time as someone names someone who pair-beats hir...and so on.
Either there will remain a tentative CW (currently Nader), or there will be found a circular tie. Solving that circular tie by the various Condorcet versions would be a lot easier than finding the circular tie.
If no one has a computer program for receiving rankings from the keyboard, and counting those rankings to make the pairwise vote totals array and the pairwise defeat-strength array, then what I suggest in the 2 previous paragraphs is the best that we can do, for the Condorcet count.
I wrote such a program, but deleted it from my inbox where it was stored. It was much more time-consuming and laborious to write than the BeatpathWinner program, and so I'm not inclined to write it over again.
What made it so laborious and time-consuming was the necessiy to give the user ways to indicate when s/he has named all the candidates and is ready to start entering the rankings, and to indicate when s/he has completed a rankng and is starting on the next ranking, and to indicate when s/he is done entering the rankngs, and to indicate if s/he wants to re-enter the most recent entry, or the current ranking, or all the rankings, or vote a candidate equal to the previously-entered one.
Someone could write such a program, to count the rankings by Condorcet. Of course if someone does that, and posts the pairwise defeat-strengths array, then it would be easy to determine winners by the various Condorcet versions.
I counted by Plurality because, regrettably, Plurality is used in our public elections. But the fact that Nader won in Plurality shows that Nader isn't just a compromise winner--Nader is the favorite of the most.
Even if Nader only won as a compromise, in Approval and Condorcet, he'd still be the valid winner, and the best social choice. But the Plurality win shows that he's also the most favorite.
In the Novermber national presidential election, if you live in the U.S., and if you prefer Nader to Kerry, then will you vote for Nader instead of Kerry?
Many, of course, will "strategically" vote for Kerry, but "strategic" voting isn't valid when it's based on media misinformation.
It was pointed out to me that _Time_ magazine conducted an early presidential poll, and Nader won, beating everyone, including all the Democrats.
I haven't counted CR yet, because some of the ballots' CR column didn't print out completely initiallly.
Mike Ossipoff
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