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

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the feedback.  Before replying, I'm going to point out a
new, alternate version of the script:
http://electorama.com/2004/condorcetballot/?rate=scale

One other tweak is the mouse over ghosting of potential changed values
on stars.

Comments inline:

bql at bolson.org wrote:

> 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?

I like the fact that you've got complete tallies.  Also, being
JavaScript-free is an advantage in many contexts.  One thing I plan to
do is to make it possible to use the form without JavaScript in a
limited form.

I've seen a lot of JavaScript-free interfaces, and just about all of
them make it difficult to deal with a large number of candidates.  My
main goal is to come up with a user interface that is as intuitive and
pleasant to use as possible.  Given the proliferation of modern
browsers, it's silly that we still restrict ourselves to 1996 technology.

> The stars thing looks like Amazon. I guess people understand that well 
> enough.
> Are negative numbers too much math for the average american?

Probably ;-)  Nonetheless, I decided to spend some time on an alternate
interface that makes sense.

>> 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.

It's mainly about being able to sort the candidate by rating after
rating them.  The fact that one can sort by the other columns is a bonus
feature that I wasn't seeking out.

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

I'm focusing on getting the user interface right before worrying about
the back end.  I've done it the other way around, and I've found that by
working on the back end first, it's too easy to lose enthusiasm for
improving the interface.

>> 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

This all looks like a lot of great work.  I've downloaded one of the
software distros (vote_util_current.tar.gz) and noticed that there's no
indication of what license you are offering this software under.

I haven't decided whether I'm going to write a new backend yet or find
another project (or several projects) to hitch my trailer to.  I'm
particularly excited about this effort:
http://www.masquilier.org/agora/

This is a mod to phpBB polling that allows for Condorcet and Approval
voting.  The thing that's exciting about it is that phpBB is very
commonly used software.  If this project matures enough, it could
conceivably make it into the mainline phpBB distro.

Rob