You are assuming that everybody voted for their top choice. I'm looking at this a little differently. I strongly suspect that there are many voters who would have preferred McClintock over Arnold, but voted for Arnold because they preferred him to Bustamante. (Similarly, there are a fair number who preferred Camejo or Ariana to Cruz, but voted for Cruz because they preferred him to Arnold. This would be unlikely to change anything, however)

McClintock claims to have data indicating that he would have won if people voted for the person they most wanted for governor rather than thinking of it as a choice between the two front runners. While this claim is not implausible, I suspect you are correct that Arnold would have won under any reasonable voting system.

Now consider the 2002 CA election. If you got rid of the primary and just had a single preferential vote between Davis, Simon, Riordan, Jones, and Camejo (and the other 10 minor candidates on the primary ballot), it's my firm belief that Riordan would have won easily. And thus we could have avoided this recall in the first place.

For the Democrats in the audience (i.e. most of you), if the 2000 presidential election were held on a preferential ballot, the Nader vote would have broken at least 4:1 for Gore and Gore would have won easily.

--John