 The core idea of multi-stage methods is to successively remove candidates that perform "poorly" in an election. For the Hare Rule, performing poorly is interpreted as receiving the fewest first place votes. There are other ways to identify "poorly performing" candidates in an election scenario. For instance, the Coombs Rule successively removes candidates that are ranked last by the most voters (see Grofman and Feld 2004 for an overview of Coombs Rule). 