Sorry if I wasn't clear - I have no objection to using Condorcet to select the winner - I applaud that and really like the voting interface. I am just struggling with how to make the scalar values meaningful as intermediate results.
And I am struggling with the same thing. :) I guess the difference is I am just a bit more optimistic than many as to whether or not it can be done effectively.
I should point out that these are not just "intermediate results", they may well be final results. Even after a poll is closed, rankings and scores may be very useful. In many polls and elections, being second or third choice does count for something, since not all elections are meant to pick a single winner, but might instead be used to simply measure strengths of opinions. For instance, say you are voting for the most annoying bugs in a software product, which the developers can use to prioritize bug fixes. They want to know not only who is the "winner", and not only the ranking order of the candidates....but they want to know the relative *strength* of each candidate (and note that having a pairwise matrix doesn't help them a lot, while having a set of scalar scores does).
Since the last ballot that comes in can change any of the victory strengths used in Beatpath or Ranked Pairs, the scalar values aren't useful as a guage of how far ahead the winner is, and this could confuse the voters who are used to other methods.
While I understand your point, I still believe that scalar scores can give an indication -- albeit not a perfect one -- of how far ahead one candidate is from another. For instance, if the scores show a wide gap between two candidates, that's an indication that it would take a large number of votes for the lower ranking candidate to overtake the higher ranking one. If the gap is narrow, the lower candidate could overtake the higher one with fewer votes.
To me, and I expect to many, that is intuitively meaningful information ....and it would be very hard to directly deduce from a pairwise matrix, or from a count of all ballot combinations.
It's not a bad thing - just depends upon the purpose of displaying intermediate results. As long as the results are labeled with something like "If the election were over now, the winners would be..." or some such disclaimer it would be fine.
Well I tend to think that it is implied by the fact that the poll is still open, but ok.
Personally i think many are looking at this a bit narrowly.....not all elections and polls necessarily have an "end" that is so important. When I vote in an opinion poll something on CNN.com, they show me the result immediately, and I doubt I have ever bothered to come back "after the poll is closed" to see the final result. It doesn't really matter to me. The polls could stay open forever for all I care, and it would still be just as meaningful to view the current results (well, you can debate the overall meaningfulness of web polls like those on CNN, but that is a different issue).
You just don't want a lot of after-the-fact questions like "How could Sally have lost? She was 'ahead' by 30 points yesterday...."
Hopefully people would understand that in the meantime, people came along, and voted for someone other than Sally -- would they not? If they are confused by that, I don't know what to do..... This is true for any election method: the score right now may not be the final result. However, if Condorcet-based systems were really so erratic and unstable that this effect became extremely pronounced, I don't think I'd want to use Condorcet. Luckily I just don't think this is the case.
I think the first few suggestions were good ones for your purposes. For the generalization to other purposes where the electorate understands that it is using Condorcet, I'd prefer something like my list of all ballots with non-zero votes, because that is more accurate an indicator of where my vote fits with the others.
Understood, although I guess you understand that in an election such as the recent California governor one which had 130 candidates, that would be a whole lot of ballot combinations for you to look through.
But indeed, if this thing I'm doing is a success, I'm sure I'll eventually have an option for some sort of advanced view where you can see all that kind information if you want. But being as my goal is to get as many people as possible to embrace Condorcet-based methods over plurality, I think it is essential to produce simple, straightforward, clearly digestible graphic output -- which to me means scores that can be put in a bar graph.
-rob
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