[EM] Simulation of political identity space in voting

[Brian Olson]

Ka-Ping Ye did some excellent work which inspired me to replicate it.  
Given a two axis system of candidate and voter space, plot the  
results of population of voters centered at points on the plane  
voting based on distance to candidate.

The original is here, and was discussed on this list many months ago:
http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

My new results are here:
http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/spacegraph.html

Mostly I've independently verified the results, but I've added my  
favorite pet method, Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings (IRNR) into  
the mix.

This method is great because it makes behaviors of the election  
method readily apparent visually. I used to claim that IRNR would be  
free of IRV's oddities because IRNR considered the whole ballot and  
used continuous ratings. Someone here cleverly found a counter case,  
but graphically it jumps out of the picture that IRNR does have  
irregularities. On the plus side, they're much smaller than IRV's  
problems. :-)

I wish it were easier to test all the different methods that have  
been proposed here. I already had a simulation framework for testing  
social utility which will run lots of tests under different numbers  
of candidates and voters and varying error rate. The same voting  
implementation also gets used by this new graphical test. It would be  
great to get more systems built in and tested. There's a pretty  
simple C++ interface to code to when implementing a new election  
method. I've made my source available in the past and will do so  
again if anyone wants to also work on this.

I understand that most of you aren't computer scientists and quick to  
program up new tests, but I'm excited about this testing right now  
and if you'll just implement your favorite election method in _some_  
language, C, C++, java, javascript, perl, python, heck I'll even  
accept PHP, LISP or FORTRAN, I'll translate it and fit it into the  
test harness.

Anyway, mostly I wanted to share the pretty graphs I made of  
simulated elections. An ounce of data is worth a pound of theorizing?


Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/