James Green-Armytage asked Quick question for everyone: Do you happen to know when the method described in the subject line (eliminate the plurality loser until there is a Condorcet winner) was first proposed?
Forest's attempt at an answer: I don't know about "first proposed," but I know that we considered it in passing when we came up with the DMC proposal, one of whose many formulations is to eliminate the approval loser (or candidate ranked on the fewest number of ballots) until there is a Condorcet Winner. We settled on Approval instead of Plurality as the basis for elimination because it seemed a lot better at the time. It turns out that DMC is monotonic, for example, while the Plurality based method is not. Long before that (about ten years ago) I suggested a lot of different tweaks on IRV that would make it Condorcet compliant in an attempt to show IRV supporters how easy it would be to keep IRV from discarding the "true majority winner." Mike Ossipoff advised me to forget it, because (having been rebuffed himself after proposing all of these ideas and more) he had found out by sad experience that the hard core IRV supporters were too closed minded to even consider anything other than pure Hare/STV/AV/IRV. Since that time I have found a few staunch IRV supporters that are willing to think about other possibilities, but on the whole Mike seems to have been right. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info