[EM] Practicality of ranked ballot methods

[Andrew Myers]

Ralph Suter writes:
>    I'll cite just two examples of actual decisions I was involved with. One
>    was at the 1996 founding convention of an organization tentatively named
>    "The Alliance." There were over 300 people at the convention, and one
>    decision they needed to make was to choose a permanent name from a dozen
>    or so choices that had been winnowed down from a much larger list by a
>    name committee. ...  Nevertheless, the actual vote and the counting of it
>    took several hours.

Making voting electronic seems to help, first because you can give a user
interface that makes ranking easy, and second, because tabulation is very fast.
People are routinely running elections with dozens or hundreds of voters on
CIVS (the largest election so far had 1600 voters). In five years everyone will
able to access the web from a cell phone, so I expect it will work even in
a convention situation.

Cheers,

-- Andrew