[EM] How choice of voting systems depend on amount of participants

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 10/07/2014 10:42 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
> On 10/6/2014 11:47 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>> ...
>> I seem to recall someone mentioning a US region that used majority
>> voting: there were rounds of voting until someone got an outright
>> majority, and the rounds kept on for as long as needed. I don't recall
>> the details, though.
>
> This is how the "electoral college" works when voting for U.S.
> President, or at least the way it was set up to work.  Under current
> conditions, with each state giving all its electoral votes to either the
> Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate (and never any
> electoral votes to a third-party candidate), in recent decades there has
> always a winner on the first round of voting.  If there were not a
> majority winner, then the contest would be (and has been, three or four
> times) transferred to the U.S. House of Representatives, with each state
> getting one vote (but with no indication as to how that one vote (per
> state) is assigned).

That's not quite what I was thinking about. More like this:

1. Hold an election.
2. If candidate X has a majority, you're done; elect X.
3. Otherwise, wait k weeks and
4. Go to 1.

So the elections keep going until the voters decide that someone 
deserves a majority. (The person who was elected last time stays in 
office until that happens.)

Or was that how the Electoral College was originally intended to work?