http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/olympics_2012/4553116.stm The article makes a huge assumption, but the gist is this: During the third round of ballotting, with the participants being London, Paris and Madrid, a vote was erroneously cast for Paris. The intended recipent was Madrid. This would have caused a Paris-Madrid tie, and a vote-off to determine which city was eliminated. The thought is this: London votes would have gone to Madrid, believing them easier to beat than Paris, Paris is then eliminated, and THEIR votes would have gone to Madrid in the final ballot. The belief is that would have been enough to put Madrid over the top, instead of London. Like I said, it's a huge assumption, and it ignores that Barcelona had the games in 1992, but I wonder why the story even goes out if there isn't a little something there.
I can't believe the IOC allows members who can not choose one of 3 boxes to tick without ballsing it up!! I could do that for a living
It also was reported that a terrorist cell erroneously bombed London only after one of the terrorist accidentally voted to bomb Madrid instead of Paris. A vote for Paris would have created a Paris-Madrid tie, and since Madrid had already been bombed, the chosen city would have been Paris. Instead, the terrorists got all mixed up and lost count, and so they figured they might as well bomb whichever city gets the Olympic games, which erroneously turned out to be London.
When the result was first announced, there were media reports that the Finns had switched their votes from Paris to London because Chirac had insulted Finnish cuisine! This latest story needs to be filed with reports of all those old people in Palm Beach who claimed that they voted for the wrong presidential candidate in 2000.
This just shows how stupid runoff voting systems are. No matter what system is used it won't be perfect, but it is inevitable that such a voting system would be full of corruption and insincere voting to get desired results. If they just used Approval voting (everyone votes for all the cities they like) then the gamesmanship could be avoided and it would only take a single round of easy voting to do it.