Ka-Ping Ye did some excellent work which inspired me to replicate it. Given a two axis system of candidate and voter space, plot the results of population of voters centered at points on the plane voting based on distance to candidate.
The original is here, and was discussed on this list many months ago: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ My new results are here: http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/spacegraph.html Mostly I've independently verified the results, but I've added my favorite pet method, Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings (IRNR) into the mix. This method is great because it makes behaviors of the election method readily apparent visually. I used to claim that IRNR would be free of IRV's oddities because IRNR considered the whole ballot and used continuous ratings. Someone here cleverly found a counter case, but graphically it jumps out of the picture that IRNR does have irregularities. On the plus side, they're much smaller than IRV's problems. :-) I wish it were easier to test all the different methods that have been proposed here. I already had a simulation framework for testing social utility which will run lots of tests under different numbers of candidates and voters and varying error rate. The same voting implementation also gets used by this new graphical test. It would be great to get more systems built in and tested. There's a pretty simple C++ interface to code to when implementing a new election method. I've made my source available in the past and will do so again if anyone wants to also work on this. I understand that most of you aren't computer scientists and quick to program up new tests, but I'm excited about this testing right now and if you'll just implement your favorite election method in _some_ language, C, C++, java, javascript, perl, python, heck I'll even accept PHP, LISP or FORTRAN, I'll translate it and fit it into the test harness. Anyway, mostly I wanted to share the pretty graphs I made of simulated elections. An ounce of data is worth a pound of theorizing? Brian Olson http://bolson.org/ ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info