I assume the article's data is accurate with regards to the rounds of voting.
Round one- no surprise to me the Republican got the most votes. As noted, Burlington being a left leaning city those on the left split the votes for liberal candidates. And had the city used normal voting, well shame on the candidates for running and splitting the ballot becoming spoilers.
Round two- again no surprise. The redistributed votes naturaallywent to one of the two liberal candidates although your graph shows a slight increaase for Wright from about 2800 to 3400.
Round three- most liberal votes went to the Progressive.
I am not a fan of RCV, as I said, bu it looks to me like the RCV worked EXACTLY as it should have and led to the outcome of a liberal/progressive winning the office. To claim it failed by applying some your Condorcet Criterion is completely inapplicable! It's as if you are trying to mind-read everyone that voted.
RCV didn't fail at all here- the writer is applying an outside criteria to claim it did!
quote: if one candidate would beat every other candidate in a head to head match up, then they should be the winner
Except that is not how that election system was set up! First, even under conventional voting you would have had Wright (R) vs one of the three liberals (Kiss, Montrol, or Smith). And you can't really keep the write-in off the ballot nor the Green. One of the liberals would clearly have won in a normal vote setting.
And I don't see how the Democrats can complain of being robbed, though I see how the GOP candidate might. Progressive Kiss was ahead of Democrat Montroll the entire time. They all knew what they were getting into when they ran. Though I do agree with
To claim the RCV faied the Concorcet test is to ludicrously assume a head-to-head run against ONLY the write-in or only the Green Party candidate. Sorry but the Concorcet Criteria is a ridiculous concept to apply to elections. Trying to apply it makes elections even LESS transparent than RCV and more complicated to the voters.
I think the better option is for a run-off round where if no candidate garners a solid majority win, the top two go head to head in a run-off election. In your scenario the wn would still go to Bob Kiss.
