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
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
the
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
Yup.
http://betterpolls.com/et?vrr=-clistif=-dcand=4seats=1data=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]
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
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
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,
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
On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Rob Lanphier wrote:
Warren,
The problem with placing paramount importance on utility in voting
methods is not that it doesn't exist, it's that there's no systematic,
fair way of measuring utility. In the highly charged atmosphere of
high-stakes decision making, it's hard
On Sat, 13 Aug 2005, Warren Smith wrote:
I challenge people to write computer programs to perform condorcet and
range elections. I have so far never encountered anybody who produced a
shorter program for condorcet. Not even close.
I find this an interesting point as I have implemented quite
How do you compare a new entry all the ones that came before? Having a
policy for incomplete ballots isn't good enough because it doesn't compare
a new name to the other names on ballots before the first ballot to
include a new write-in candidate. So, there must always be a first pass
through
On Sun, 10 Jul 2005, Dave Ketchum wrote:
I believe I have the answer for Condorcet, and that you should be able to
build on this for ratings. I also think of voting at multiple precincts,
doing an array at each precinct, and summing the arrays for total district.
May have to scan each
Wow, convergent evolution. Just a couple days ago I turned my attention to
redistricting.
On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Dr.Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
This brings us back to the question of automated redistricting. We've often
discussed how the 'fairest' algorithm would use a measure such as
minimizing lanes
On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Forest Simmons wrote:
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:07:16 -0800
From: Mike [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [EM] Deterministic Districting
Mike wrote ...
Well, it's not really deterministic (in the sense that the results are
repeatable), but one could could put the districting maps
On Sun, 2 Jan 2005, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Brian,
--- Brian Olson [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit :
If a majority of all the voters prefer X to Y, then they should have
a way of voting that ensures that Y won't win, without any member of
that majority voting a less-liked candidate over a more-liked one.
I
I've made a new web site, http://betterpolls.com/ , which allows people to
create polls and have them counted using a few of our favorite election
methods.
Suggestions and constructive criticism always welcome.
http://betterpolls.com/
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-methods mailing
I wish we had nice clean definitions of our favorite criteria that were
amenable to automatic checking. Then we just implement any new method in a
few lines of code, and run the checker. In most cases I believe the
computations could be completed in a few hours or a few days on any of our
In a method that mistreats clones, a clone is an irrelevant alternative.
Dropping a non-winning clone, allowing the other non-winning clone to win,
violates the desired independence of irrelevant alternatives.
Thus, everything that violates the clone criterion, violates independence
of
On Tue, 16 Nov 2004, Paul Kislanko wrote:
The original question was how to define the word spoiler, and I've come to
the conclusion that it cannot be used at all without some qualification. An
IRV-spoiler might be a clone or it might be an IA, and it can be one
without being both.
A spoiler is the
On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Paul Kislanko wrote:
Likewise, IRV can suffer spoilers, a problem Condorcet avoids by reading
all the ranking in each ballot.
Condorcet does not reference ballots, Condorcet depends upon the pairwise
matrix which cannot be mapped back to ballots.
I've never heard of anyone
I've added Ranked Pairs, marginal and winning votes varients.
I've made the Condorcet output prettier.
And I've started implementing multi-seat methods.
http://bolson.org/v/vote_form.html
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, Bart Ingles wrote:
I started out on this list in 1998 as an IRV supporter, but now see it as a
step in the wrong direction. Back then I believed IRV had properties I
considered important (e.g. resistance to low-utility winners in worst-case
scenarios), but have long since
See also my voting utility source code:
http://bolson.org/voting/vote_util/index.html
Approval, Borda, Bucklin, Condorcet + beatpath, Condorcet + rated tie
breaker as per James Green-Armytage, Coombs, Instant Runoff Normalized
Ratings, IRV, Rating summation; and for multi seat elections STV and
On Sun, 12 Sep 2004, Rob Lanphier wrote:
I spent the better part of today mucking around with Javascript and DHTML,
and have come up with something that I hope makes a pretty good web interface
for an n-rank ballot. The results are here:
http://electorama.com/2004/condorcetballot/
Hmm. Ok. My
On Wed, 9 Jun 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
You wrote:
Tally:
1. Pairwise tally, using the ranked ballots only. Elect the Condorcet
winner if one exists.
So in the examples:
45 A 100 B 70 C 0
10 B 100 A 70 C 0
5 B 100 C 70 A 0
40 C 100 B 70 A 0
45 A 100 B 10 C 0
10 B 100 A 90 C 0
5 B
On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, James Green-Armytage wrote:
It occurred to me that there is another method which is similar to
weighted pairwise, which uses an approval cutoff rather than a cardinal
ratings ballot.
My first reaction is that this won't actually break ties. A majority would
like two
http://bolson.org:8080/v/vote_form.html
Now supports candidate preference lists:
*23 abc
*24 cba
*22 bac
IRNR, Condorcet (+beatpath), IRV, Borda, Raw Cardinal Ratings, Approval
(ratings 0 and the top half of rankings are approved), Bucklin and
Coombs are now implemented.
Brian Olson
On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
I agree that Plurality in the first round suffers from all the same
problems as Plurality in the final election. So, my question is -- if
people *want* a two-round system, what is the most efficient election
method to use? I think Ranked
I was prodded to be curious about the question of Who are the people on
the EM list? Are we academics? Hobbyists? Politicians?
I could start. I have a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon
University. Software engineering is my day job. I try to be active in
local political meetings and
This is silly. I agree that Mike O. (I hope I didn't leave out anything
important) is wrong in his misnaming of Mr. James Green-Armytage. I
would guess that the desire to abbreviate comes in part from the
technology Mike is using to access this list. I've never seen his posts
use the sort of reply
Latest web toy: a poll on Election Methods, Ballot Styles, Voting
Technology and Representation Systems.
http://bolson.org:8080/v/t?poll=em
As I am wont to do, it's a Rated ballot. :-)
Enjoy. I hope someone finds this useful/amusing.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-methods
Let's pretend that the various methods are black-boxes on the back end.
On the front end is the ballot. If a voter doesn't understand the
black-box back end, we hope they can at least understand how to express
themserves on the ballot.
Ballot Styles, from least to most complexity/information:
On Thu, 20 May 2004, Chris Benham wrote:
Brian Olsen (same day):
So, is it a problem to instruct a voter in the usage of a ballot?
Choose One
Mark all choices you find to be acceptable.
Why should voters, in a pure rankings method, only rank candidates that
they consider deserve
On Mon, 17 May 2004, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:
Brian Olson--
You probably have written a better method than IRV.
You wrote:
Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings
(IRNR)
Every voter casts a rating of each choice on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0 or
some equivalent scale. Each voter's voting power is
On Mon, 17 May 2004, Curt Siffert wrote:
Brian - it sounds like zero is meaningless in IRNR, correct?
On the like ... dislike scale of ratings, 0.0 is no opinion.
If you
normalized between 1 and 0 rather than 1 and -1, the results would be
identical?
I'm not sure of that, but I think
On Mon, 17 May 2004, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
My concern is to ensure that the process is friendly to multiple-choice
options. My fear is that the traditional yes/no vote could easily be
used to hold the assembly 'hostage', by only giving them a choice
between the lesser of two evils. At
On May 17, 2004, at 9:04 AM, Ken Johnson wrote:
I was, until recently, a fanatical advocate of Approval. I tried to
demonstrate by empirical simulation the superiority of Approval over
rank methods, based on the criterion that the election method should
maximize social utility as defined by
Hopefully this will be helpful to someone:
http://bolson.org/voting/vote_form.html
Submit a bunch of votes and it will be tallied according to
IRV,Borda,Condorcet,IRNR and raw rating summation.
It takes a slightly different format than things seem to be discussed
around here. It wants columns
On Sun, 16 May 2004, Jobst Heitzig wrote:
Neutrality: Now this is something I did not understand yet.
Quote:
Neutrality requires that if two problems are such that the ranking
method cannot rank any player [that is, any option! JH] above another,
then the ranking method should still be
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