Ian, I think a big part of the reason that Condorcet methods aren't adopted is that from the perspective of a party in power, it's clear how such methods could undermine their ability to stay in power. IRV has some ability to disregard weak candidates, that's all; if a party in power is sometimes stung by third party candidates then IRV could be appealing here. But IRV will still basically stick to electing one of the FPP contenders.
If people want to use a Condorcet method but they don't want to use a method so complicated as RP, Schulze, or Jobst's River method, then I suggest one of these: 1. Elect the Smith set member whose greatest loss is the weakest (according to winning votes) 2. If there is no Condorcet winner, elect the candidate with the most rankings (Condorcet//Approval with implicit approval) 3. Elect the Smith set member with the most rankings I also feel it is ok to "fudge" Condorcet slightly to gain other criteria. In particular my "Improved Condorcet//Approval" method technically fails Condorcet but picks up compliance with the favorite betrayal criterion. I point this out partly because while I like method #2, my simulations suggested rather frequent occurrence of favorite betrayal incentive under it... I could not support a Borda-based method because Borda's mechanism strikes me as unreasonable. It doesn't make sense for scoring to be dependent upon the number of candidates representing some policy. Kevin Venzke _____________________________________________________________________________ Ne gardez plus qu'une seule adresse mail ! Copiez vos mails vers Yahoo! Mail http://mail.yahoo.fr ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info