[EM] IRV ballot pile count (proof of closed form)

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Feb 6, 2010, at 12:27 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> For all practical purposes, except when there are only a few candidates, the first format (1) would be much more compact than the second - which is the point you're making. The data is probably quite compressible as well.

Well, yes. So why bother with opaque binary formats? Choose a natural text representation of the ballots, add a digital signature, and compress the result. For linear ballots, each ballot is just a list of candidates, or candidate keys (A,B,etc) with a key-to-name table added.