[EM] VoteFair Ranking software version 6.0 in C++ with MIT license

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 12/01/2020 05.34, VoteFair wrote:
> Kristofer ~
> 
> It occurs to me that you might be thinking that the VoteFair Ranking
> SOFTWARE provides the definition of VoteFair popularity ranking.  That
> is not the case.
> 
> VoteFair popularity ranking is defined in two of my books -- "The
> Creative Problem Solver's Toolbox" and "Ending The Hidden Unfairness In
> U.S. Elections" -- and in the Condorcet-Kemeny ("Kemeny-Young")
> Wikipedia article.
> 
> Those definitions should make it clear to anyone who understands
> mathematics that the difference between VoteFair popularity ranking and
> the method John Kemeny published is that Kemeny counts opposition and
> VoteFair counts support, and that otherwise the two methods are
> mathematically equivalent.

Let me try to restate that to see if I got it right, because it seems
like an odd distinction.

A ranked voting method is a function that takes, as an input, a set of
ballots, and produces either a social ranking or a winner set (depending
on what definition you agree with).

What happens inside the function is irrelevant to the definition. You
could, if you had infinite memory, implement it as a huge table that you
would just look up to find out what the output would be for a given input.

Given this definition, there are two possibilities. Either the VoteFair
software implements the VoteFair method, or it does not. By "implements
the method" I mean that running the VoteFair software on some input
election always provides the output that the method would.

Now, I was assuming that the software was an accurate implementation of
the method, so that instead of a method, you actually had a family of
them (parameterized by that constant), none of which would agree with
Kemeny all the time. It seems that you instead are saying that, as you
define the VoteFair ranking, it does agree with Kemeny all the time, but
the software doesn't.

Could you give me a definition of the VoteFair method itself? Without
knowing what bit is the software and what bit is the method, it's
difficult to get further. For instance, it would be hard to know whether
the results that the VoteFair software gives when Kemeny orderings are
tied is a property of the method or of the software, because the
definition of the Kemeny method itself doesn't say what should happen in
such a case.