On removing Condorcet effects from pairwise election tallies

Condorcet profiles are responsible for a number of well known preference aggregation paradoxes. It is reasonable to claim that these profiles represent complete ties between the candidates and should therefore be excluded to determine election outcomes. Established profile decomposition techniques are of limited usefulness in extracting and removing Condorcet effects, because of the computational complexity involved, even if complete knowledge of voters’ rankings of all candidates are available. The paper discusses an easily implementable method of removing or reducing Condorcet effects from pairwise scores. Pairwise scores (and not complete knowledge of voters’ rankings) are often the only available data based on which an election winner has to be determined. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013