A question about the perfect tense

Question: At least some volunteers who said they had acted fairly in choosing the easy task would have said that it was unfair for someone else to do so.

It is actually a CR question choice in the OG No.650. I think the tenses here "said", "had acted", "would have said" are awkward.

It makes sense that we say "who said that they had acted ...", it means the action "act" happened before the action "say" in the past.

But if we add the "would have said", it is totally different. Because, as we all know, "would have" means that something you actually didn't do in the past.

So the meaning of the original sentence is volunteers didn't say that it was unfair for someone else to do so. In fact, as the argument implied, they did so.