Even Condorcet methods can be buried — Alaska 2022, and why the completion method matters¶
rb-j (Robert Bristow-Johnson), arguing the Condorcet case on r/EndFPTP, walked through a burial attack on the real Alaska 2022 numbers: a bloc of Peltola voters insincerely rank the Condorcet winner Begich last, manufacturing a cycle to knock him out. His own honest finding — which this page reproduces and verifies — is that the attack's success depends entirely on the completion method. Margin-based Condorcet methods (MinMax, Schulze, Ranked Pairs) shrug it off; a runoff/Hare completion falls for it. The deeper lesson is the even-handed one this repo keeps landing on: no method is strategy-proof — not even Condorcet.**
→ Topic hub: Burial (the cross-method view — Copeland, Borda, STAR and IRV side by side). Related: Alaska 2022 (the honest case) · the 5-1-0 challenge (STAR's strategy edge) · strategic voting · Gibbard–Satterthwaite · Condorcet · burial vs Ranked Robin.
Sincere: Begich is the Condorcet winner¶
The real Alaska special, reduced to a faithful 200-voter model (Peltola / Begich / Palin), as ranked ballots (alaska_sincere). Head-to-head:
Begich beats Peltola +9
Begich beats Palin +39
Peltola beats Palin +4
→ Begich is the Condorcet winner
Every Condorcet method elects Begich. Only RCV-IRV elects Peltola — it eliminates Begich first for having the fewest first-choices (the center squeeze; the whole point of the Alaska case).
The burial: 20 voters rank the winner last¶
Now the attack. Of the 50 sincere Peltola > Begich > Palin voters, 20 bury Begich — insincerely voting Peltola > Palin > Begich (alaska_buried). Peltola is still their favorite; they've only pushed Begich beneath Palin to sabotage him. That one move flips a single pairwise:
Begich beats Peltola +9 (unchanged)
Peltola beats Palin +4 (unchanged)
Palin beats Begich +1 ← was Begich +39; the burial flipped it
→ cycle: Begich > Peltola > Palin > Begich, no Condorcet winner
The completion methods split (verified with pref_voting)¶
| Method | Sincere | Buried |
|---|---|---|
| MinMax (margins) | Begich | Begich ✅ resists |
| Ranked Pairs (margins) | Begich | Begich ✅ resists |
| Schulze (beat-path) | Begich | Begich ✅ resists |
| Condorcet-Hare / Top-Two-Runoff | Begich | Peltola ❌ burial wins |
| RCV-IRV (plain, no Condorcet check) | Peltola | Peltola |
Why the margin-based methods hold: in the manufactured cycle, the weakest defeat is Palin's +1 over Begich — exactly because the buriers only barely dragged Begich under Palin. MinMax, Schulze, and Ranked Pairs all discard that weakest link, so Begich still wins and the strategy backfires (its cost: 20 voters risked helping elect Palin). But Condorcet-Hare / TTR — when no Condorcet winner exists, run a top-two/IRV among the survivors — eliminates Begich for his thin first-choice count and hands the seat to Peltola: the burial succeeds.
Why no BetterVoting link on this one? This case turns on the margin-based Condorcet methods (MinMax, Schulze, Ranked Pairs), and BetterVoting doesn't offer them — its methods are STAR / STAR-PR / Approval / Ranked Robin / IRV / Plurality / STV. On BV these ballots could only show IRV (→ Peltola both times — the un-interesting half) and Ranked Robin / Copeland (a 3-way tie in the buried cycle, which BV breaks at random). Since BetterVoting can't reproduce the point, this case is verified against
pref_voting— which does implement those methods — plus the LH engine for IRV, rather than frozen from a BV run. (Same reasoning as the RR-tiebreak case: when BV can't reproduce the deterministic point, we don't mint a misleading BV backing.)
The honest bottom line¶
- Conceded — and it's rb-j's own point: Condorcet methods are not strategy-proof. Burial can manufacture a cycle to unseat the Condorcet winner. That's Gibbard again — every deterministic method is manipulable, Condorcet included. So "just elect the Condorcet winner" is not a clean escape from strategy; it relocates the strategy to cycle creation.
- The completion method is the whole ballgame. Among Condorcet methods, margin-based completion (MinMax/Schulze/Ranked Pairs) is markedly more burial-resistant than a Hare/runoff completion — because a burial that only just creates a cycle leaves a tell-tale weak defeat the margin methods throw out. If you're going to run a Condorcet method, this is a real argument for the margin-based ones.
- Keep it in proportion. Real honest cycles are very rare — by FairVote's own count, about 2 of ~500 RCV elections. And burial is risky: misjudge the margins and you elect your less-preferred candidate. This is a reason to choose the completion method well, not a reason to fear Condorcet methods — just as STAR's 5-1-0 edge is a strategy sub-region, not a reason to fear STAR. Every method has its strategic seam; honesty is naming them and their bounds.
Reproduce it¶
# RCV-IRV (both -> Peltola), via the LH engine:
python3 STARVote_LH_tabulation_engine/starvote_larry_hastings.py method_comparisons/condorcet_burial_alaska/cases/alaska_buried_c3_b200.yaml
# The Condorcet completion methods (MinMax/Schulze/Ranked Pairs/Hare) are verified
# with pref_voting — the sincere→Begich, buried→{Begich for margins, Peltola for Hare}
# split above is its output.
Source of the argument: rb-j (Robert Bristow-Johnson), r/EndFPTP, on the Alaska August 2022 special. Numbers reduced ~943:1 to a 200-voter teaching model (the same faithful profile as alaska_2022, after Graham-Squire & McCune); the burial threshold (20 of 50) and every completion-method winner were verified with the LH engine and pref_voting.