There is a brief article on the Science Daily website today titled "Mathematically Ranking Ranking Methods" that touched on rank aggregation methods, which is one useful way to put voting methods into practice. Here is the link for those who are interested:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110524153532.htm A brief excerpt: In a paper published this month in the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, authors Timothy Chartier, Erich Kreutzer, Amy Langville, and Kathryn Pedings mathematically analyze three commonly-used ranking methods. "We studied the sensitivity and stability of three popular ranking methods: PageRank, which is the method Google has used to rank web pages, and the Colley and Massey methods, which have been used by the Bowl Championship Series to rank U.S. college football teams," explains Langville. Mike Rouse ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
