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

[Rob Brown]

This is really sweet.

The only minor quibbles are

1) when you sort it, the default is to put highest scoring candidate at the 
bottom rather than the top, so you have to click again (or scroll down the 
page) to see what you did.

2) Since you can easily specify "ties", the sorting can be a bit misleading, 
because it arbitrarily chooses one candidate over another to be on top, which 
many might confuse or frustrate people.  For instance, my favorite candidate 
is B, but I also want to give 5 stars to A....but it annoys me that A is shown 
*above* B.  So I might drop A to 4 stars just because it will now show my 
favorite on top.  Because of this, one candidate could be disadvantaged 
because of the secondary sorting order (alphabetical?).  My suggestion would 
be something to visually group equal candidates together (only when sorted by 
rank), such as this:
  http://www.karmatics.com/voting/roblanphiermod.gif
(I'm a javascripter myself, so if you like this idea but it seems overly 
tricky or just a pain in the ass, maybe I can do it.  I've done some funky 
dhtml stuff on tables, so I know it is possible)


I have to say, I actually like the fact that there are only 6 possible 
rankings.  I don't think it's a problem in the real world (although purists 
will disagree I'm sure)....since it does NOT force you to only rank your top 
5....you can give all candidates a ranking, some of them will just have to be 
ranked equally.  I find it a reasonable, pragmatic compromise between keeping 
the ballots easy to use, and allowing voters to fully express their choices.

The nice thing about this is it would also translate fairly well to a machine-
read paper ballot.  It wouldn't be as slick, obviously, but it would allow for 
non-cumbersome ballots.

As I mentioned this in a previous post, a paper ballot might look like this 
(and it could have six check boxes as well -- although technically 3 boxes 
allow as many rankings as yours, if you interpret a check in two boxes as 
the "average" of the two)

  1st     2nd    3rd 
choice  choice  choice

 [  ]    [  ]    [  ]       George Bush

 [  ]    [  ]    [  ]       Wesley Clark

 [  ]    [  ]    [  ]       Howard Dean

 [  ]    [  ]    [  ]       John Edwards

 [  ]    [  ]    [  ]       John Kerry

 [  ]    [  ]    [  ]       John McCain

 [  ]    [  ]    [  ]       Ralph Nader


-rob