Saturday, May 08, 2004

Convention analysis

Utahpolitics.org has one account, including the IRV totals for the gubernatorial nomination race.

Without spending a lot of time on it, the most interest features of the vote totals seem to be the degree to which candidates received support from defeated candidates. It looks to me like Stephens, Walker, and Lampropolous each came in with a core group of supporters, but didn't do a good job picking up support from defeated candidates (though L did get a big chuck of Stephens' delegates). Huntsman did better, but Karras outperformed him in every round in terms of picking up additional delegates.

Game theorists will be disappointed to note that Huntsman and Karras were 1-2 in the standings as of round 1, and in almost every round thereafter (Lampropolous pulled into second briefly after picking up more of Stephens' delegates, but right after that most of Walker's delegates moved to Karras, and Lampropolous was eliminated). Thus, we don't have any obvious entertaining paradoxes (though if the state party were to publish statistics on all ballots cast, we could determine whether a Condorcet paradox existed, or probably devise a Borda count that would enable one of the eliminated candidates to place in the top 2).

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