Earlier quoted context omitted.
Condorcet methods performed well in this analysis, even under the various strategy models. Although it says that STAR performed slightly better under strategic voting, its scores are still very high. The main reason given in the text for preferring to highlight STAR was a (common) belief that the Condorcet methods are too difficult to explain and that explainability is important. Personally I think the Condorcet meth…
> Personally I think the Condorcet methods are not that difficult to explain. To the voter, no. It is just a ranked choice/ordinal system (which is why people get mad at IRV being called RCV). Just rank your candidates in order of preference. People naturally understand this, yes. BUT that's not what people typically mean when they says the system is hard to understand. What matters is transparency and how easy it is…
Those virtual elections are not difficult to run (electronically) or explain though: "we use the ballots to work out for every person how they would do in a one on one election against each other person".
And the process for running the elections is straightforward too - count the number of ballots where one person appears higher in the list than the other person. There's no room for argument here, unless you're arguing about the ballots, which is something you can do with any system.
All of that stuff seems pretty straightforward to me.
Now, it is the case that the various ways of resolving situations where you have cycles is somewhat complex. I think that's just because those situations are genuinely complex, but there are things that can be done here to choose a relatively explainable one and work out good ways to visualize and explain it.
Finally, while cardinal systems can express the distance between preferences, there are ways an ordinal system can express things hard for a cardinal system. In an ordinal system you can allow a ballot not to include someone and have that mean 'no preference' between that person and all other candidates (perhaps because of lack of knowledge), while in an cardinal system an unscored person would have to be counted as having an actual score. There's also the question whether preferences really are consistent enough for a cardinal system to accurately reflect them - you might like X three times more than Y, and two times more than Z, but does that necessarily mean that you like Z one and a half times more than Y? Personally I also think there's a big difference between preferences between two candidates you'd be happy to win and candidates you actively don't want to win, and I don't think that difference can be captured by just making a scalar larger - not that ordinal approaches capture this either.