[EM] Intro to list (etc)

[Adam Haas Tarr]

>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.

Looks like a promising idea, Rob.

>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.

It looks good.  I'd suggest replacing the words "unpick" "move up" and "move 
down" with an X, an up arrow, and a down arrow.  I'd also suggest implementing 
drag-and-drop of the actual names (drop McCain bewteen Bush and Gore, 
automatically sliding down the lower of the two).  Just my suggestions, of 
course - as I said it looks nice.

>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....

I don't mean to open a huge can of worms here, but are you tabulating results by 
winning votes or by margins?  If less strategy is your goal, then you should use 
winning votes.  You can search the archives for debates on this.

>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.

Here is what I would use.  Compute the results using beatpath, aka Schulze, as 
oppose to Ranked Pairs (aka Tideman).  Then display the winning candidate, along 
with the number of votes on his weakest beatpath.  Then display the remaining 
candidates in order of strongest beatpath against the winner.

This will guarantee that the winner has the most votes, and it will give the 
remaining candidates in a reasonable decreasing order.  No candidate can get 
more votes than the number of voters (easier to swallow than Borda), and only 
one candidate can have more than 50% of the vote.  Finally, if the voters all 
vote for only one candidate this reduces to a plurality count, which is a nice 
property to have.

>From a technical perspective, Beatpath and Ranked Pairs are so similar that it's 
probably not worth worrying about.  If you want to use Ranked Pairs to determine 
the winner, but display the beatpath counts, that probably wouldn't present a 
problem.  I'm merely proposing using Beatpath because it provides a count that 
is useful to you for presentation purposes.

A good beatpath description can be found under "Schulze" at
http://cec.wustl.edu/~rhl1/rbvote/desc.html

Although I prefer the calculation method used at:
http://www.ericgorr.net/condorcet/

Good luck with this,
Adam