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Your are referring to only one form of runoff voting, where the person with the least votes for an office is eliminated in each round. There are other forms, not all of which eliminate in such a manner.

To my knowledge, the term "instant runoff voting" is only used for what's also called Hare's method or the Alternative Vote. Quoting Wikipedia: In the initial count, the first preference of each voter is counted and used to order the candidates. Each first preference counts as one vote for the appropriate candidate. Once all the first preferences are counted, if one candidate holds a majority, that candidate wins. Otherwise the candidate who holds the fewest first preferences is eliminated..

If you would eliminate the candidate that gets the most last-place votes, it would no longer be IRV, it would be Coomb's method. That method, too, exhibits the oddness that moving your candidate higher can make him lose; every method that eliminates one candidate at a time according to a weighted positional method (first place n points, second place k points..., last place p points) can do so.

As for "satisfy", I meant just that: studies of instant runoff versus other "simple" voting methods has shown that in practice, it results in choices that reflect the actual preferences of the most people.

Could you give me links? Without knowing what they mean by simple or by instant runoff, it's hard to say anything here. For instance, I would imagine Approval to satisfy more than IRV, or Minmax, where you pick the candidate whose worst one-on-one loss has the smallest margin of defeat, to do better as well, but perhaps the latter is no longer considered simple.

Systems that conform to the Condorcet criteria tend to have the problem that they do not account for non-transitivity of inequalities (which Wikipedia calls "circular ambiguities").

The Condorcet rule can be ambiguous, that much is correct. Yet all that means is that there's no "the" Condorcet method, you have to pick a method that conforms to the criterion and does whatever when there is no such winner. That can be as simple as adding a rule that you eliminate, among the bottom two in IRV, the one who loses one-on-one to the other; or it can be an entirely new rule, like Schulze or Ranked Pairs.
To argue against Condorcet because it's ambiguous would be like saying that any method that satisfies majority rule is suspect because majority rule doesn't tell you what to do if nobody got a majority.

Various forms of Instant Runoff minimize problems with non-transitivity and also Arrow's theorem, while retaining the strengths of systems like Condorcet. Therefore it is superior.

Instant Runoff Voting (at least the AV method, I don't know which others you mean) hides the non-transitivity. So do the Condorcet methods above - the methods don't act differently depending on whether or not there is ambiguity. Approval itself sidesteps the issue completely because it's not a ranked method.

The best strategy in Cumulative voting is to vote plurality-style. You want to make a difference: well, the best way of doing that is pushing all your votes toward the candidate most likely to win that you like (the least of two evils) - that's pretty much what the page says.

Personally, I'd be in favor of a Condorcet method for single-winner and a proportional representation method like STV for multiple winners. The Condorcet criterion simply says that if one candidate is preferred to every other one-on-one, then that candidate should win. It's like sports: if a team beats every other team outright, it should win. The Schulze method, which is a pretty good Condorcet method, is being used by Wikimedia, the Pirate Party of Sweden, and KDE already. It's not very easy to explain, however; if that's a goal, Ranked Pairs is pretty easy and good, too.

Unlike the above, STV has actually been tried in America. New York used it in the 1930s-1940s until the established party machines abolished it by Red Scare tactics. STV's problem wasn't that it didn't work, its problem was that it worked too well. It is indeed interesting that the Republicans, who had no chance of winning pre-STV, actually opposed STV.

One should be very careful about turning the multiwinner system, STV, into a single-winner system (IRV). Some groups in the US are trying to do so, most notably FairVote, and they are linking the concept of the ranked ballot to IRV itself. IRV is not a very good method: while it is more fair than Plurality, as another post here stated, Australia has been using IRV for a very long time and still has a two-party system.

There is such a thing as a type of STV that becomes a Condorcet method when only electing a single winner: Schulze STV, but it is very complex; about the only chance one would have to implement it would be if the voting population could trust the method on performance alone, like a computer or other machine (which most people don't know how works, yet use).

monkeys don't fly

Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man would beg to differ.

* Toto would probably agree with you, but he's a dog and they tend to be ridiculous.

On the other hand, I think he's talking about his hero, Hitler, kicking your granny's door down and taking pictures of her in the bath in order to pass them round the SS for masturbation purposes. Since neither of us has any evidence to back up our beliefs about What He Meant To Say But Didn't, I win by default.

No, it's a distribution license, not an end user license. There's no need to show the GPL during installation, the GPL imposes no restrictions on the end USER, it imposes restrictions on those who might want to distribute/modify the program. They don't actually have to USE the software http://jyte.com/cl/the-gpl-is-not-an-end-user-license-agreement-2

Any scientist who is a creationist should be viewed with deepest suspicion.

Why, because they don't believe the same thing you do? I have found that religious beliefs generally don't affect the quality of a scientist's research. It doesn't matter if they believe in higher truths as long as they do good science and don't try to use faith-based arguments to justify their research results.

If you don't agree, you can vote one it.

Raise your hand and give a vote. http://jyte.com/cl/i-can-find-estonia-on-world-cou ntries-map

http://jyte.com/cl/estonian-teenagers-run-linux-gr eedy-estonian-teenagers-run-windows-from-piratebay .org

IMO, IRV breaks down too often. It's not quite as bad as Two-Round Runoff (the system that led to the Chirac/LePen faceoff a few years back in France), and of course it's a hell of a lot better than Plurality. However, it does have problems with instability, especially if there aren't exactly two "top" parties. When the 3rd-place party gets popular enough to rival the 2nd-place, IRV painfully fails the Monotonicity criterion — meaning that voting for your favorite candidate can sometimes make him lose. While less stagnant than plurality, the resulting system still has a lot of inertia.

Condorcet, OTOH, is a bit more mathematically sensible — especially the Schulze "beatpath" version. It's guaranteed to select the candidate that the most people can live with, and like IRV it's 100% clone-proof (i.e. similar candidates don't hurt or help each other). The only downside is that understanding how Condorcet works requires an understanding of logic that is beyond a good proportion of the voting public — which means that the voting public won't be able to verify the counting process themselves, which undermines confidence in the results.

As far as simple voting methods go, Approval is a fairly nice substitute. Essentially, Approval is similar to Plurality, except "vote for one" becomes "vote for one or more": you check off every candidate you think would do an OK job, and the winner is counted the same as before. It has a fairly crappy worst-case scenario, but if the voters are using some fairly common-sense tactics, it's nearly as good as Condorcet. Even in the worst case, it also passes the Monotonicity criterion, and it's 100% clone-proof.

The gerrymandering problem... yeah. Gerrymandering needs to go. Sadly, I have fewer ideas on how to fix that.

If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared
that's why we created Jyte. Jyte is a new way to find, read and follow the news. It has all the benefits of RSS readers in that you don't have to surf the web to find your content, you can read the content in the Jyte window, and it takes up a very small amount of bandwidth. You're getting headlines, not whole articles, pushed to you. The real breakthrough, however, is that the articles you receive are based on search technology. Instead of subscribing to feeds that already exist, you create your own search with whatever keywords you want ("athens olympics -swimming", for example) and get only the news that relates. Since we're still in Beta mode, blogs and RSS feeds haven't yet been included, but in a few weeks' time we will be greatly expanding these capabilities.