Condorcet is actually quite simple, and the voting community does it a huge disservice by insisting on talking about it in very complicated ways.
Condorcet is just "if a candidate would beat all others head to head, then that candidate is the winner".
But the voting community insists on immediately jumping to all the crazy tie-breaking algorithms you need to implement if there is a "loop" (Smith Set).
My opinion has always been that those two concepts should be severed. All the "flaws" of Condorcet actually only apply to when tiebreakers are used. The flaws do not apply when there is a Condorcet Winner.
(The Smith Set isn't hard to understand either. It's just "these candidates beat all others head to head.")
And when there isn't a Condorcet Winner, that is actually valuable information. It means that the population was not ready to decide. It may warrant a later runoff, giving the population more opportunity to research the remaining Smith-Set candidates, and decide through additional debates or whatever else. As an alternative, people can always choose to apply any old method for the tiebreaker - even IRV! Condorcet-IRV (where IRV would only be applied to the Smith Set) strictly dominates IRV-only, in every way.
Condorcet is just "if a candidate would beat all others head to head, then that candidate is the winner".
But the voting community insists on immediately jumping to all the crazy tie-breaking algorithms you need to implement if there is a "loop" (Smith Set).
My opinion has always been that those two concepts should be severed. All the "flaws" of Condorcet actually only apply to when tiebreakers are used. The flaws do not apply when there is a Condorcet Winner.
(The Smith Set isn't hard to understand either. It's just "these candidates beat all others head to head.")
And when there isn't a Condorcet Winner, that is actually valuable information. It means that the population was not ready to decide. It may warrant a later runoff, giving the population more opportunity to research the remaining Smith-Set candidates, and decide through additional debates or whatever else. As an alternative, people can always choose to apply any old method for the tiebreaker - even IRV! Condorcet-IRV (where IRV would only be applied to the Smith Set) strictly dominates IRV-only, in every way.