bolson

Imagine political opinion space is a plane. Ok, lots of people measure like liberal-conservative on social and fiscal scales, but really any axes will do. Now position some candidates on that plane. Now simulate an election with the the center of a gaussian distribution of voters at the center of pixels on that plane voting for the closest candidates. This is a great way to visualize the behavior of election methods.
( one sample image of IRV being weird )
lots of pictures here
credit due to the original here, but my pictures are bigger. :-)