One comment on concerns related to IRV's decision between the last two candidates on if that decision is a majority decision.
Many ballots may have exhausted before the last round. As a result one may claim that the last round decision was not a majority decision. The point is that in all elections that have numerous candidates there is a risk that voters will not properly indicate their preferences on those candidates that turn out to be the strongest competitors. Typically methods have some agreed way of handling those unrated/unranked candidates (or alternatively they require full ratings /rankings). The typical rule is to consider those candidates to be at the shared last position. Also in IRV one could say that those votes that were eliminated before the last round did take position. They said that those two candidates are both at shared last position. This may have happened because the voters really felt so, or since the voters thought (erroneously) that these candidates had no chances to win. How should we see other methods like Range and Condorcet in this light? If there is a default handling of candidates that were not rated/ranked should we say that there is something wrong with the winner if there are many votes that did not take position on the competition between the winner and its strongest competitors? It is possible that the voters would have liked to take position but for some reason did not know which candidates would be the strongest in this election. This situation is the same for all methods. A second round could improve things. But it may be that it is enough if the method offers the voters the option to indicate their opinion. This should be fair enough, at least if the number of the candidates is reasonable (not e.g. 100) or the leading candidates are well known so that all voters can evaluate those key candidates if they want to do so. Juho ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info