The Schwartz set resolution algorithm is absolutely best of breed. But there's an old saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.
If we look at the actual ballots, it's really interesting. Options 7 and 8 were semantically pretty much equivalent. It's hard to see any reason for someone to rank them very differently. So if the voters are rational, we'd think that nearly all ballots would have options 7 and 8 ranking either the same or adjacent. And that if one is ranked the same as other options, then they should both be. Yet many of the ballots rank one but not the other, or rank them very differently. Some voters ranked either option 7 or 8 as "1" and allowed everything else to default. It's very difficult to imagine someone who actually preferred option 7 being equally satisfied with any of options 1-6 and 8. We tend to assume that the DD electorate is highly sophisticated and rational and understand how to correctly express their preferences, and how ranking works. But a quick perusal of the actual ballots has disabused me of that notion. The usual reaction to this sort of thing is to alter the voter instructions. But people have intuitions for how voting works, and blurbs might not be very effective at changing their behaviour. --Barak.
