Hardy would certainly have recognized Condorcet’s anguish as perplexity of the most unnecessary kind. He would have advised Condorcet not to ask who the best candidate really was, or even who the public really intended to install in office, but rather which candidate we should define to be the public choice. And this formalist take on democracy is more or less general in the free world today. In the contested 2000 presidential election in Florida, thousands of Palm Beach County voters who believed they were voting for Al Gore in fact recorded votes for the paleoconservative Reform Party
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