Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Given that much better methods exist, have been tried and worked, and are much easier to canvass, WTF?
If I were to guess: in part a desire to produce a stepping stone to STV, and in part organizational inertia. FairVote bet on IRV and now will "stay the course".
To address the former: the grail here would be a polytime monotone summable multiwinner method that reduces to a good Condorcet variant (or Bucklin/Range/etc) in the single-winner case. A multiwinner method can be summable in two ways: summable with the number of seats held fixed, or summable no matter what. What's important is that we don't know of such a method; but also that the stepping stone strategy itself might be dangerous - if the base method is bad, then it may fail to dislodge those whose interest is in less democracy, and so the objective of moving to multiwinner never gains any additional strength by the so-called stepping stone.
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