[EM] Displaying intermediate results in Condorcet-based elections (re: Rob Brown's original question)

[Paul Kislanko]

If I were going to display intermediate results in a Condorcet election I think this is how I would do it. It presents all the information the voters need to see how their candidate is doing compared to all of the others. (I usually convert all of the count: A>B>C style examples on this list to this format anyway, because it is easier for me to spot the patterns of blocks of like-minded voters).

The thing to remember is that in a ranked-ballot system the voter is not so much voting for a candidate, but for a particular ballot configuration. In a three-candidate race I don't have 3 choices, I have 15. If you list out all of the possible ballots that have received votes (presumably after the voter has recorded her judgements) it is very clear to the voter where her particular choices fit in the grand scheme of things. You could highlight the current leader in the pairwise matrix and the ballot configuration that corresponds to the voter's choices.

The problem with this is that the number of possible ballots gets very large very fast. For 3 candidates there are 15, for 4, 64, and by the time you get to 8 there are over 100,000. Of course, in practice most of these don't occur in any specific election, and for intermediate results you can list only the "top n" by count of votes for a particular configuration (if mine doesn't show up on the response screen, I just say "oh, well, I voted for McGovern again (republicans insert Goldwater). 

I couldn't figure out how to display an example in Outlook Express, so I've attached a little html fragment. The a1, a2, ... etc. would be counts of votes that matched the ballot, and the A, B and C are candidate names. 
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