[EM] IRV ballot pile count (proof of closed form)

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> Given that much better methods exist, have been tried and worked, and 
> are much easier to canvass, WTF?

If I were to guess: in part a desire to produce a stepping stone to STV, 
and in part organizational inertia. FairVote bet on IRV and now will 
"stay the course".

To address the former: the grail here would be a polytime monotone 
summable multiwinner method that reduces to a good Condorcet variant (or 
Bucklin/Range/etc) in the single-winner case. A multiwinner method can 
be summable in two ways: summable with the number of seats held fixed, 
or summable no matter what.
What's important is that we don't know of such a method; but also that 
the stepping stone strategy itself might be dangerous - if the base 
method is bad, then it may fail to dislodge those whose interest is in 
less democracy, and so the objective of moving to multiwinner never 
gains any additional strength by the so-called stepping stone.