[EM] "scored condorcet", etc

[Paul Kislanko]

> Rob Brown wrote:
> 
> Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd <at> lomaxdesign.com> writes:
> > Color (even gray scale) can instantly show the Condorcet 
> winner in a 
> > pairwise matrix. I'll use gray scale. When the candidate naming the 
> > row wins, leave the background color of the cell white. When the 
> > column candidate wins, gray it. The winner is the only 
> candidate with 
> > a white row all the way across. (Color the cell with the same name 
> > row and column white also.)
> 
> Yes, but all it shows is the winner, and only if that 
> candidate is the condorcet
> winner.  What if the winner is not a condorcet winner?  The 
> matrix gives no hint
> of how the winner was arrived at, short of "here's all the 
> numbers, get out your
> calculator and have fun!"  Nor does it show anything about 
> how non-winners did
> in comparison.  The color hints that "number of pairwise wins" is the
> determining factor, but it's not.
> 

As I see it, there are two problems here. First, a Condorcet method is a
process that translates a 3-dimensional input (ballots, alternatives, ranks)
into a two-dimensional represemtation of the result of the process. I played
around with a graphic to show how ranked ballots look when turned into a
bar-graph and it looks like http://www.kislanko.com/poll.jpg, which I didn't
find helpful enough to use.

> Basically, it just doesn't communicate what a bar graph does.

Well, the second problem is that a bar graph sometimes isn't able to
communicate enough.  The closest I can come to translating ranked ballots
(NOT a pairwise matrix) into a bar graph along the lines of your example
would be something that has a row for each candidate that shows the
percentage of votes for each rank in different colors in the same bar.