Why it saves time- more

[Steve Eppley]

DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:
>A megacomputer for large scale Condorcet elections is needed since
>there would have to be an electronic record of all the votes. 
>
>Candidates and at least some voters would want to know election details 
[snip]

I wouldn't say that this requires a "megacomputer".  The electronic
record of all the votes is a storage issue, not a calculation speed 
issue.  And this storage requirement isn't large in 1990's terms:

Suppose 100,000,000 voters each rank an average of 99 candidates.
Assume it takes one byte to store one candidate i.d., and one byte
to mark the end of each ballot.  That comes to 10 billion bytes.  I
think that can be stored comfortably on a few $20 tape cartridges,
even without attempting compression.  

In practice, the ballots would be accumulated on many local tapes,
and tallied in parallel.  A precinct could easily store all its
ballots, for multiple elections, on a $20 tape.

Data is easily duplicated; the ballots would be made widely
available (probably by transmitting the contents over the internet).
Processing them to discover interesting details like actual rankings
of a particular candidate would be limited by the tape i/o speed, not
the cpu speed.  If RAM is a problem (and I haven't looked at that)
then it would probably be done in multiple passes, several candidates
per pass, in order of how well they finished. 

--Steve