Hi Robert,<div><br></div><div>Thanks for the detailed feedback. I've got a slightly updated version available here:</div><div><a href="http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/File:Burlington2009election-infosheet.png">http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/File:Burlington2009election-infosheet.png</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>More inline...<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 4:16 PM, robert bristow-johnson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rbj@audioimagination.com">rbj@audioimagination.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im"><br>
On Mar 6, 2010, at 4:18 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
The key insight I had was to break the electorate up by their first preference, and then do Schulze-wv tallies on each subset of ballots. That yielded a reasonably realistic way to lay out the candidates in a 2D spatial representation.<br>
</blockquote>
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Schulze? For the viewer who might have trouble visualizing IRV (despite your quite good layout, i really like what you're doing)?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Well, there's nothing Schulze-specific in the tallies...that's just the Condorcet-variant that's my default starting point (most used in the wild, and most tested in Electowidget, but I just as easily could have used any other variant in this case). The only point of that part of the exercise was to get a sense of what each of the constituencies thought of the other candidates, which was a pretty quick exercise once I had all of the data parsed.</div>
<div><br></div><div>That said, since it was only a one line change to this page, I changed from Schulze-wv to Copeland, because Copeland is the most accessible of the Condorcet methods:</div><div><a href="http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/2009_Burlington,_Vermont_Mayoral_Election">http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/2009_Burlington,_Vermont_Mayoral_Election</a></div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
listen the Condorcet result of the 2009 election is unambiguous. it gets ordered [M]ontroll 1st, [K]iss, [W]right, [S]mith, and [H]Simpson last. every candidate ordered higher beats any candidate ordered lower in a head-to-head race. i think there are 10 head-to-head pairings.<br>
<br>
M 4064<br>
K 3477<br>
<br>
M 4597 K 4313<br>
W 3664 W 4061<br>
<br>
M 4570 K 3944 W 3971<br>
S 2997 S 3576 S 3793<br>
<br>
M 6263 K 5515 W 5270 S 5570<br>
H 591 H 844 H 1310 H 721<br>
<br>
i like a triangle instead of a defeat matrix, at least if it can be ordered so nicely. </blockquote><div><br></div><div>I've got some ideas I'm going to play around with. The Debian folks do a pretty good job displaying the results of their elections:</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0001#outcome">http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0001#outcome</a></div><div><br></div><div>I think that type of a diagram could possibly be dolled up and fleshed out a little bit. However, before I go down that road, I'm planning to play around with a few new ideas of my own to see if I can hit upon something that really tells the story.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">"H" is for "Homer". notice how well he does against Wright. what does that tell us about Wright's "negatives"? and Wright *barely* beast Smith (and Independent with no party backing). i just can't believe the New North Enders, who were primarily behind the repeal movement, think that Wright was the guy who was robbed, because he had the plurality of first-choice votes.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'm certain of it. It also doesn't help that their least liked candidate is someone that they generally preferred *two other viable candidates* to. The whole *point* of egghead solutions like IRV is that this sort of thing isn't supposed to happen. I can fully imagine them assuming this whole thing was the conspiracy all along in order to let the hippie communists like Kiss run things (just to be clear...I'm merely channeling an imaginary Wright voter. I have no idea whether Kiss is a "hippie" or a "communist", or if there's even a Wright voter out there who might even think that. Whew....that was a lot of work for a joke that wasn't even very good. Though I'll be there is a least one Wright voter who thinks that Kiss is a hippie and a communist. Just sayin')</div>
<div><br></div><div>That's my longwinded way of saying that while Wright voters' only have a legitimate beef about one of the candidates not winning (Montroll), it's not hard to imagine why they likely felt triply screwed over in this election.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">my numbers come from the files from the clerk's office. do check out Warren's page at <a href="http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html" target="_blank">http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html</a> . there are small discrepancies, but no more than 5 votes.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'll double check the numbers. I pulled mine from a zipfile that was linked to from the Wikipedia page. I *think* they were the official results, but I might be wrong.</div><div><br>
</div><div>Note that what may have happened was that they updated the "final" results a month or two after the election. If you pulled your results very soon after the original election, it's quite possible that you have something different from the same source. I don't know if there were any official recounts, but it wouldn't surprise me at all given the hubbub about this particular race.<br>
</div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><br>
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i mean, if i wanted to see, in a nutshell, what happened, what went wrong, what could have gone wronger with IRV.<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think we're on the same page. This particular one pager was actually meant to be "one of x", where x>1. I don't think I'm going to try to illustrate "wronger" with this particular case (wronger is illustrated pretty well with the Tennessee example[1] and with Debian 2003[2]), but I do want the mechanics of IRV in this particular election to be crystal clear, as well as showing how a Condorcet-compliant method would have been much, much better. This result was bad enough and consequential enough that I think it's important there's a more general understanding of it.</div>
<div><br></div><div>One of the few thigns I like about IRV is that we get really great data from IRV elections (at least, when we get *full* results). While it's theoretically possible to game IRV elections, I doubt there's much strategic voting going on in any place other than Australia perhaps....people here just don't know how to do it yet. So, the results are about as purely sincere as you're probably going to get in a real election.</div>
<div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
this looks very cool, Rob.<br><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#888888"><br></font></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Thanks!</div><div><br></div><div>Rob</div><div><br></div><div>Links from above:</div><div>[1] Tennessee example: </div>
</div><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_different_voting_systems_under_similar_circumstances">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_different_voting_systems_under_similar_circumstances</a></div><div>[2] Debian 2003:</div>
<div><a href="http://blog.robla.net/2003/if-debian-used-irv/">http://blog.robla.net/2003/if-debian-used-irv/</a></div>