Cardinal Voting

Cardinal Voting

Introduction

Cardinal voting is also known as Range voting. It is a better voting system than the one currently used in most of the world. It would result in fairer elections, better representing the opinion of the people.

More general information is available in the following web site: http://rangevoting.org/

Ballot User interface

A drop-down selection box for each candidate, with 102 options: the numbers 0-99 for scoring purposes, an "X" for symbolizing a "non-vote" (does not affect the average for that candidate at all), and then a "Default" option (which should actually be the default). The voter will be allowed to specify (preferably right at the beginning) what that default value should be. The default option for that choice should probably be a "non-vote", giving the most meaningful election results from lazy voters, and still allowing them to choose the default to be a 0 or a 50, for example, should they want to.

Vote counting algorithm

You just collect a value from 0-99 (or a specification of a

"non-vote") from each user for each candidate. For every vote ballot,

you go through every scored candidate on it, and increment both the

total score by whatever that voter gave to the given candidate, as

well as incrementing the counter of the number of votes that candidate

has received. For an "X" (i.e. non-vote), you simply don't increment

either.

Once every ballot has been processed, you determine which candidate

received the greatest number of actual votes (numbers 0-99, not

non-votes or "X"). You then eliminate any candidates who did not

receive at least 25% of that number of real votes, and elect the

winner as the one with the highest average score (total score over

number of real votes) from the set of remaining candidates.

Technical implementation.

The module could either make use of the project Electowidget or by using the Drupal voting API.

The Electowidget solution would require more work, because Electowidget itself is not fully ready, but Cardinal Voting implementation with Electowidget would be reuseable with all php-based CMS on the web.

Another idea is to take Andrew Myers's public domain CIVS system, which

is a system that allows people on the internet to set up and conduct elections using

two Condorcet voting methods, and modify CIVS so that other voting methods

such as range voting are now made available. You can use CIVS by browsing to its

front page http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html

and you can download CIVS source code from http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/changelog.html

Myers tells me that it will be fine with him to modify the CIVS code

long as it acknowledges him and is used for nonprofit purposes.

He believes it would be way easier to start from CIVS than

to rebuild it from the ground up. He suggests the following

for those who want to modify it to also support range voting:

To add range voting, you'd want to modify the "results" script to add a