[EM] Intro to list (etc)

[Rob Brown]

Hi all,

I have lurked on this list on and off for a few years (the whole Nader 
thing in 2000 really got me interested in how thorougly broken plurality 
systems are).  Now I'm working on a web-based Condorcet based election 
system, so I figured I'd drop in and introduce myself, and see if anyone 
has any thoughts on the issue I'm having.

I'm a programmer (c/c++/java/javascript) with an industrial design 
background, so I tend to be big on UI and graphical stuff. I have also 
dabbled in fuzzy logic, collaborative filtering, people matching and the 
like for a good while.

Here is a UI I am working on for doing for ranking 
candidates:    http://weblogz.com/voting/2000pres.html
This demo is of course based on the 2000 presidential election, and allows 
you to rank candidates with a (hopefully) friendly UI.  I avoided having 
people manually assign numbers to candidates  (after all, they are sitting 
in front of a perfectly good computer which can do that sort of thing 
well!), and I tried using a little animation, which seems to help in making 
it easy for voters to follow what they are doing.

On the back end, I don't have any problem with figuring out how to tabulate 
the results, in terms of who is the first choice, who is the second, etc. I 
am using the Condorcet method, and using  ranked pairs to break ties.  No 
problem there....

Now I need to figure out how to display results, in a way that makes sense 
to people.  The people I have talked to who are likely to use this system 
want to see more information beyond just the final ranking of candidates -- 
they want to see some kind of "score" or a graph.  They are used to web 
based polls where you can see a nice little graph, showing how many voted 
for which candidate.  Knowing whether an election was neck-and-neck or a 
landslide is relevant information people should be able to see, I think.

I have tried showing various things:  for instance, I can show a Borda 
count score.  But of course the Borda score does not always correllate with 
the Condorcet outcome:  you could have a higher score for a lower placed 
candidate, and that will confuse people.

Another thing I tried was showing a score which is the sum of all margins 
by which they beat (or lost to) every other candidate.  For instance, if 20 
voters placed B above A, and 10 placed A above B, that would add 10 to B's 
score and subtract 10 from A's score. Again, though, it may not correllate 
with the Condorcet ranking, although for some reason my feeling is that 
this type of score is "better" than a Borda count. (is there a name for 
such a way of scoring?)

So has anyone tried showing bar graphs or numerical scores for Condorcet 
elections?  I suspect that if this is completely impossible to show 
something reasonable, I won't have much luck selling a condorcet based 
system to a mainstream web audience....people really seem to want to see 
something to help them understand the results.  On the other hand, my gut 
feeling is that there MUST be some way to have Condorcet results equate to 
numerical values.

Any thoughts?

-rob