[EM] Compulsory Voting

In my world, everyone eligible has to vote. So as not to introduce junk data into the system, 'truncation' or otherwise casting an incomplete vote is allowed. You may even cast a blank ballot. I like the social responsibility of voting. Everyone should do it. And if people don't want any of t

[EM] Implementations in Java, C, C++ and perl

I'm proud to offer a much updated set of election method implementations. http://bolson.org/voting/vote_util/ Mostly it's the basic set of VRR, IRV, IRNR, Raw Rating Summation and a Histogram utility implemented across Java, C, C++ and perl. STV is also implemented in Java and C. Java, C and p

Re: [EM] Suggested name for Range Voting: Free Voting

Yum! Tastes like chicken. On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Jonathan Lundell wrote: > Free-range voting? Brian Olson http://bolson.org/ election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

[EM] On Naming and Advocacy

"free voting" does indeed have nice connotations in the free-as-in-freedom way. Free can also mean unrestricted and unregulated and someone specially cynical might take that to mean we're free to stuff the ballot box. :-/ Outside this list, I've been plugging "rankings and ratings ballots" as t

Re: [EM] A real vote just received

Yup. http://betterpolls.com/et?vrr=-clist&if=-d&cand=4&seats=1&data=F%3ES%3EP%3DB%0D%0AP%3EB%3EF%3DS%0D%0AS%3EP%3EF%3DB%0D%0AP%3ES%3EF%3DB%0D%0AF%3ES%3EP%3DB%0D%0AF%3DS%3DP%3DB 6 votes is a kinda small sample (5 really, a=b=c=d is pretty much abstention). On Wed, 7 Jun 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wr

Re: [EM] Question about a criterion for ballot counting

This discussion sounds like what I encountered in Computer Science under the topics of computability and computational complexity. I think we can safely say that a good election method is an algorithm that executes in bounded time. An election method should not be an exercise in solving the Hal

Re: [EM] Simulations with social welfare functions

To answer my own question, I think the attached perl script nicely shows the difference between std-dev and gini by this output: data: 1, 2, 3, 4 std: 1.29099444873581 gini: 0.25 data: 1, 1, 1, 9 std: 4 gini: 0.5 data: 1, 1, 1, 999 std: 499 gini: 0.747005988023952 data: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1

Re: [EM] Simulations with social welfare functions

On Wed, 24 May 2006, Jobst Heitzig wrote: > a week ago I suggested using social welfare functions (such as the Gini > welfare function) to evaluate election methods. I have also been trying to run simulations that count up the social welfare, but my initial results caused me to doubt my impleme

Re: [EM] using welfare functions in election methods

Ooo, I like it. Now I want to re-run all my old simulations that just measured average happiness. Though, the tricky thing I've always run into when trying to formulate a better social utility measure is that when trying to make sure no one is left too far behind, do we unfairly reward people w

[EM] Real IRV Election, Disputable Result

Here it is folks, the one we've been waiting for: http://www.ci.burlington.vt.us/ct/elections/ A real live IRV election, run last Tuesday, and different methods give different results. The raw data can be downloaded here: http://www.burlingtonvotes.org/20060307/ I've adapted the data and run

Re: [EM] electowidget

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Tallying with lots of methods is nice, but kinda hard on the implementer. > I've implemented half a dozen methods myself in my C/C++/Java/Perl code > (which I ought to update the availability of, it should go up at > http://bolson.org/voting/dist/ ). I

Re: [EM] electowidget

Being an implementation wonk as I am, I comment... On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Warren Smith wrote: > Second, I do not like negative numbers as votes. They are confusing. > Make it 0 to 10 not -5 to +5, say. I disagree. I think negative and positive numbers map quite naturally to dislike and like degre