[EM] Uncountable Ballot

[Josh Narins]

If FPTP could be seen as zero dimension(point) voting, and ranked
ballots as one dimensional(line) voting, then what I would like to
suggest is that...

  IF part of the goal is to increase the amount of message contained in
  each vote(and thus more fully capture the nuances of their opinions)

  THEN two dimensional(planar) voting is even better.

> >
> > ex.
> >      A   B   C   D
> >    / -------------
> > A  | x   B   A   D
> > B  | B   x   C   B
> > C  | A   C   x   C
> > D  | D   B   C   x
> >

On this individual ballot, there is this cycle...
A beats C, C beats D, D beats A
so it certainly can't be represented as a ranked ballot, so can not be
counted with the methods that I have ever heard of.

Do there exist any methods to add matrix votes?

I think this could be important for many reasons.

But it is also EASIER than a ranked ballot for the user.
They never have to think about the relation of more than two candidates
to each other at a time.

Picture a little minesweeper game. If you click on a square once, it
turns to one candidate, a second time to the other, a third time back to
neutral.  Clicking on the candidate row or column header could select
that candidate against all others (limiting it to 1 per matrix, you
can't just hit that button in reverse order for all the candidates to
get the equivalent ranked ballot)

If anyone was interested, I could have a sample ballot pretty quick.  It
would be Perl/Tk. (Mike's uses Tcl/Tk, I think).

Thanks for listening.

Josh