This discussion sounds like what I encountered in Computer Science under the topics of computability and computational complexity.
I think we can safely say that a good election method is an algorithm that executes in bounded time. An election method should not be an exercise in solving the Halting Problem. Almost all election methods I've seen have compuational complexity linear in proportion to the number of voters. The Gini Welfare function recently discussed here is O(n^2) with the number of voters. I wrote this up for worst-case asymptotic algorithmic complexity for various election methods: http://bolson.org/voting/bigo.html It could be argued that to truly scale up, an election method must be linear with votes. It could also be argued that any laptop computer is good enough to run an election of a million votes, and a $10,000 computer could run a billion votes. Anyway, that's just what I thought of. Maybe it's still not the direction you were trying to go. Brian Olson http://bolson.org/ ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info