Why not a study of voting methods?

In Cunningham Township Supervisor Carol Elliott's July 11 letter on instant runoff voting, she writes that perhaps other methods of voting should be looked at in comparison to the present method.

I couldn't agree more. There has been a lot of research on how well different voting methods pick the candidates that the voters actually prefer. One thing that these researchers agree on is that although our current method of choosing candidates is intuitively appealing, it doesn't do a very good job of picking the candidates that the voters most prefer.