[dragonwriter]

> Alternate Voting is not a method of proportional representation

Alternative Voting (AV) is a single member district voting system that produces results where the representations of policy views in the elected parliament are more proportional to the views in the electorate than first past the post, and thus is a method of enhancing the proportionality of the election system for a parliament when the status quo is FPTP.

It do so less than Single Transferrable Vote (STV) in multimember districts (AV -- known more often to US audiences as Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] -- is just the single-member-district case of STV, which supports any district size).

Its relationship to other PR schemes where not all candidates are directly elected by-name by general election voters (the most frequent being Party-List Proportional and Mixed-Member Proportional) is complicated -- those schemes optimize for proportionality of partisan composition of the legislature, but provide weaker accountability of individual politicians to the general electorate.

But PR itself isn't a system, its a (continuous valued, not even binary) feature of an electoral system. You can't "implement PR", you can adopt a system that increases (or decreases) the degree to which you have PR.