[EM] Update on votevote

[culitif at tuta.io]

Hey, it's Culi again. Hope this isn't spammy, but I thought I'd share some updates on that website I shared a couple days ago since a number of y'all seemed interested in the project. 

I've been kinda in limbo between fixing up this prototype or saving work for the new site. I realized there was a lot of additions I wanted to make to the visualizations and the data structure that those visualizations rely on. Some of these changes would require modifications to the way the algorithms themselves were built. There's also a large number of optimizations I realized I should've made from the start, but will require reworking a large part of the structure so I thought I'd save that for when I rebuild it.

So instead I've been focusing on adding some new voting algorithms. Because of the above reservations about translating these results into visualizations, I've yet to make the graphs for them. However, I have added a little window on the side that will allow you to at least see the winners under different methods. So you can now see the results of the election in IRV, Coombs, Front-and-back IRV, Approval, Combined Approval, First Past the Post, Borda Count, Supplementary Vote, Copeland, a variation of Copeland I'll call Copeland-Lull, VFA (https://electowiki.org/wiki/Vote_For_and_Against), and VFA runoff. That's one election in 8-12 different methods depending on how you wanna count (not counting some variations of Borda that handle ties differently)! 

While working on this, I thought of a voting system designed specifically for voting theory nerds like y'all. It involves a scored ballot that can be translated into all of the above systems (and more) and a separate question asking you how you want your vote to be counted. If 12% voted for Borda, then the winner of the Borda version of the election would get 0.12 points. I'm (mostly) joking ofc, but it's fun to think about

Anyways, since things are a little bit hectic I've also been thinking about ways I could open this up to make it easier for people to contribute once this gets going. I think I'll have a page for each voting method that goes more in depth on different variations, tie-breakers, different criteria it meets and also make available the source code for that particular algorithm on that page. I think that would allow people to engage more directly with the implementation of it and would also make me more likely to have my mistakes pointed out to me. I'll also be writing some automated tests to validate the results of the elections (e.g. given this set of candidates and this set of voters, we'd expect these results). That should be something even non-coders could contribute to if they want to get involved. 

That's basically it for now. Thanks again for all your feedback and words of support. If people don't get too annoyed by these posts, I'll continue to keep y'all updated :P Hopefully I can make up for the deficit of Condorcet methods soon that a lot of y'all pointed out

Here's the link again btw: 
https://elegant-shaw-2cb49a.netlify.app/votevote
Best,
Culi
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20220128/f8d14331/attachment.html>