Criticisms
It has been claimed that the Penrose method is restricted to votes for which public opinion is equally divided for and against. A study of various elections has shown that this equally-divided scenario is not typical; these elections suggested that voting weights should be distributed according to the 0.9 power of the number of voters represented (in contrast to the 0.5 power used in the Penrose method).
In practice, the theoretical possibility of the decisiveness of a single vote is questionable. Elections results that come close to a tie are likely to be legally challenged, as was the case in the US presidential election in Florida in 2000. After this experience, it appears naive to think that a single vote can be pivotal.
In addition, a minor technical issues is that the theoretical argument for allocation of voting weight is based on the possibility that an individual has a deciding vote in each representative's area. This scenario is only possible when each representative has an odd number of voters in their area.
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