[EM] Demo of n-rank ballot for U.S. president

[bql at bolson.org]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Rob Lanphier wrote:

> I spent the better part of today mucking around with Javascript and DHTML, 
> and have come up with something that I hope makes a pretty good web interface 
> for an n-rank ballot.  The results are here:
> http://electorama.com/2004/condorcetballot/

Hmm. Ok. My javascript-free, ye olde HTML forms ballot (for a smaller 
selection) is here:
http://bolson.org/v/t?poll=2004r

How would you consider the plusses and minuses of the interfaces?
The stars thing looks like Amazon. I guess people understand that well 
enough.
Are negative numbers too much math for the average american?

> The most interesting part about this from a user interface perspective is the 
> sorttable.js that I found on http://www.kryogenix.org/ .  It really helps one 
> sift through a large number of candidates in a rational way.

I didn't have any desire to use such features, or intuition that I ought 
to. I just looked up candidates I wanted to mark by name, as they were 
already sorted.

The UI feature that was missing which I didn't notice till too late was 
that there is no "submit" button. :-P

> I don't have any immediate plans to incorporate this into something larger, 
> but I have eventual plans.  I would love to see someone beat me to the punch.

Well, my form has the benefit of being tallied by several election 
methods...

http://bolson.org/v/t?pollresults=2004r

The output isn't the prettiest, could use better labelling.
It's in two sections, one for the rating ballot and one for the approval 
ballot. Each section ends with the histogram of ballots cast. The data is 
run through all the same election methods, so if you've ever wondered what 
Condorcet's method run on Approval data would look like, here it is.

Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/