I read these two threads thru 2130 EST on Monday, but choose to respond to this original.
Looks like a GREAT idea, though a few details disturb me.
You talk of a primary customer, who would give their users some experience with Condorcet, but as individual voters with no choice as to details of the implementation.
Yes. My client doesn't really want to so much "give them experience with Condorcet", but simply to have a good way of doing polls that works better than plurality for picking multiple candidates. Their users are unlikely to be particularly interested in the theory. Some of them will, I'm sure, but the #1 goal is to make this seem every bit as simple to use and understand as the regular old plurality polls like you see all over the web.
*My* goal is somewhat different than my client's....I want to warm people up to Condorcet. But my approach aligns well with my client's interests.....make it seem simple. If it seems complex, it will drive people away.
Doing that well takes what I consider to be an almost complete program, so I would lay out design for a more complete program, planning to implement only the subset for starters, and then completing the rest if/when that seemed worth the extra effort. Some details:
List of candidates - done by whoever sets up election. Can have long names but MUST have a unique label of not more than 4 characters, to allow for max quantities of candidates to be displayed in vote matrix.
You mean to avoid the problem of it making the tables too wide? There ARE some options, for instance http://weblogz.com/voting/vertical.html , but that is IE only. I think I can do something for mozilla et al but it won't be quite as pretty. (I tried something below it that would work on other browsers but its pretty ugly)
I'd hate to force the poll maker to come up with understandable names that are 4 characters max.
Vote - every voter can vote, so this must be easy - perhaps permit voter to use either full or above short labels - there are other possible methods. For a simulation mode, let "voter" vote as multiple voters choosing a vote pattern.
Display ballot count matrix, as if this was last voter before polls closed. Could make sense to display this while the voter is voting, stepping as the voter goes thru ranking candidates from first to last voted by this voter. This ONLY starts with matrix as of voter starting to vote, incremented according to voter's current proposed vote.
Interesting idea with the dynamic updates.
Although honestly, I think only a small number of voters are going to be interested in seeing the matrix itself. I'm posting a response to another message ( Displaying intermediate results in Condorcet-based elections ) that covers my reasons for not wanting to show a matrix by default, and for continuing in my quest for a way to show a simple bar graph of scores.
-rob
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