[EM] eliminate the plurality loser until there is a Condorcet winner

[fsimmons at pcc.edu]

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.