[EM] Hand counting election methods

[Bart Ingles]

Marking up a pairwise matrix seems a bit of work to me, even for a
single ballot.  You might hold your thumb next to the first candidate on
the ballot, and tick off boxes in a matrix for each candidate that first
candidate beats.  Next, move your thumb down one line on the ballot and
repeat the process with the matrix.  It would be easier if the names on
the ballot were in order of preference, but if the ballot is
pre-printed, this seems unlikely.

If the matrix was on a touch screen, you could perhaps increment the
total in each box simply by touching it (but that wouldn't exactly be
hand-counting, would it?).  With paper matrices, you would need some
sort of shorthand notation to keep from filling it with "||||/"
tickmarks.

Maybe you could use a white board with the matrix marked out in a
permanent grid.  When one of the boxes had enough groups of tickmarks,
you could stop and transfer count to a numeric grid on a sheet of paper,
which could be collected periodically by a supervisor.

Bart



Eric Gorr wrote:
> 
> At 11:32 PM +0000 11/17/03, Gervase Lam wrote:
> >as finding a good way to hand count Condorcet
> >makes my brain hurt!
> 
> Why?
> 
> Seems rather trivial to me.
> 
> Just take a subset of the ballots and hand compute a pairwise matrix
> for each subset. Take each of these pairwise matrices and add them
> together.
> 
> Running the Ranked Pairs(wv) algorithm on a pairwise matrix by hand
> is rather simple.
> 
> --
> == Eric Gorr ========= http://www.ericgorr.net ========= ICQ:9293199 ===
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