AFTER 2 CENTURIES, SHOULD CONDORCETS VOTING PROCEDURE BE IMPLEMENTED

This paper focuses on decision-making by voting in systems at all levels: the grass-root organization, the community, the nation and the international system. It examines several possible reasons why Condorcet's rule for electing m out of n candidates (where 1 less-than-or-equal-to m < n and n greater-than-or-equal-to 3) has hitherto not been implemented in any public elections, despite the fact that this rule was proposed over 200 years ago and is recognized in the social-choice literature as superior to all other known majoritarian voting procedures, in terms of the normative criteria used for evaluating such procedures. It is argued that although some of the objections to implementing Condorcet's proposal may have been valid in the past, none seems to be valid any longer. In connection with one of these objections - the possible existence of cycles in the social preference ordering - we describe three solutions that refine Condorcet's original proposal. A call is made for the actual implementation of Condorcet-type procedures.