[EM] Iterative Ranked Approval Voting

[Alex Small]

3 questions about this method:
 
1)  What initial conditions do you use to start it off?  Do you start off assuming each voter only votes for his or her favorite and then proceed from there?  You could also do it other ways, e.g. vote for everybody except the least favorite in the first round.
 
2)  Off the top of my head, I don't think this method always picks the Condorcet Winner (when one exists) but I don't have a good counter example right now.  I'm pretty sure that in subsequent rounds the CW would get votes from a majority of the electorate, but it's possible that other candidates might get even larger majorities.  Anyway, if somebody can answer this one way or the other I'd appreciate it.
 
3)  I'm pretty sure that in the case of a cycle this method won't always converge.  It will sometimes, but not always.  What then?

election-methods-electorama.com-request at electorama.com wrote:
* The IRAV method uses ranked ballots to simulate multiple rounds of 
Approval Voting. In each round, a ballot is counted as an approval vote 
for the voter's favorite of the top two candidates, and for all 
candidates the voter prefers over both of them. Counting stops when the 
vote count reaches the same vote totals as an earlier round. The votes 
can be represented as a 2-dimensional array of 1-dimensional arrays in 
which the indices are the two front runners and the element arrays are 
the number of votes for each candidate.

		
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