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I find it interesting that in all those discussions about voting systems, which are mostly focused on USA president elections, nobody mentions two-round voting, also known as run-off voting.

This is what we have in Slovenia for electing our president. In the first round, there are many candidates, and each voter can vote for one. If any candidate gets at least 50% of votes, he automatically wins.

If, on the other hand, there is no majority winner, the two best candidates compete head-to-head in the second round.

Such a system allows you to always vote for your favourite candidate in the first round, and if your candidate doesn't make it into the second round, you can vote for the fallback one.

Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system




I don't believe this satisfies the Condercet criterion either. Consider these rankings of preferences:

    20% A ...
    20% B ...
    15% C ...
    15% D C ...
    15% E C ...
    15% F C ...
In a two-round run-off, one of A or B will be elected, despite the fact that 60% of voters prefer C over either A or B.


And in the real world, people would second guess this, and enough people would tactic vote for C that it would't be a problem.

"But then they can't vote for their prefered candidate which was the whole point"

Well, some people can. D, E, F could still get a few percentage points. More importantly, I don't think we would see convergence to a 2-party system.

Unless I am missing something, it looks like at least 3 parties could be sustained.




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