dead in his cell. It is not known whether he died of natural causes or was
killed.
Condorcet’s present fame rests neither on his mathematical discoveries
nor his role in the French Revolution, but is based to a much greater ex-
tent on what is known as the Condorcet paradox. This may be somewhat
of a misnomer, as it is more of an eyebrow raiser than an actual paradox.
The Condorcet paradox was the first difficulty discovered in the quest for
the ideal voting system. It can occur when the ballot contains three or
more candidates, and the voters are asked to rank them, from top to bot-
tom, in order of preference. Rank-order voting has been adopted for na-
tional elections by several countries (Australia is a leading example) and
although it is not used in the United States in national elections, it is used
in some local elections, and is gaining ground. There are at least two
good reasons to consider rank-order voting: it helps us prioritize our op-
tions, and it does a much better job of eliminating the need for runoff
elections (which are both time consuming and expensive) than does sim-
ply voting for a single candidate.
One of the chief problems of a society is how we should allocate our re-
sources. Three items of current concern to which we must allocate
resources are terrorism, health care, and education. To illustrate the Con-
dorcet paradox, suppose we polled three different individuals to rank
these items in order of importance. Here are the ballots that were col-
lected.
First Choice Second Choice Third Choice
Ballot 1 Terrorism Health care Education
Ballot 2 Health care Education Terrorism
Ballot 3 Education Terrorism Health careTwo out of three voters felt that terrorism was more important than
health care, and two out of three voters felt that health care was more im-
portant than education. If an individual voter felt that terrorism was more
important than health care, and health care was more important than
education, that voter would logically feel that terrorism was more impor-
tant than education. But the majority does not appear to behave so logi-
cally; two out of three voters feel that education is more important than
terrorism! If we are using the majority decision to determine how to al-
locate funds, we run into an insurmountable problem: it is impossible to
spend more on terrorism than on health care, more on health care than
on education—and more on education than on terrorism.Cracks in the Foundation 209