Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'public interest'.
-
I want to set up a little website on a reasonably reliable host -- that's free, due to my minimal income -- to implement a calculator that tallies voters' orders of preference using a state-of-the-art algorithm (much better than the Ranked Choice Voting algorithm). The website won't store any data or transmit data to anyone (except it would of course send the results to the user who types or pastes in the votes). The site would be just one file, a php5 script that's about 60 kBytes. To use it, one member of the voting group pastes their orders of preference into the webpage's text field, and then clicks the "tally now" button... it would respond by tallying the results on the server side (using php code) and sending the results as a refreshed webpage. The webpage is just text with some color-coding, so the bandwidth consumed would also be tiny. I'm hoping the partners at Heliohost have the will and a way to spare me from the monthly logins... they seem unnecessary due to the negligible storage and bandwidth that my site would consume, and my free time is very limited. This website would not be for my personal benefit or profit. My goal is to teach the world about this voting system by letting people use it. This kind of system would have many benefits if used by democracies: It would minimize spoiling (Ranked Choice Voting does NOT eliminate spoiling, contrary to what many of its proponents claim), eliminate the need for primary elections, create a much stronger incentive for politicians to adopt policies similar to the majority-preferred policies they believe the voters themselves would collectively choose (if voters were able to vote directly on issues), end political polarization, reliably defeat extremists, and stabilize policies. In other words, the goal is to strengthen democracy and save the world. The reason that primitive voting methods (including Ranked Choice Voting) cause so many problems is that they count at most one majority. But the fact is, there's more than one majority when there are more than two candidates, and all of the head-to-head majorities of the complete round robin tournament can be counted given the voters' orders of preference. (The most widely used, most frequently used voting method -- the Robert's Rules procedure for voting on motions -- pays attention only to head-to-head majorities, which are based on relative preferences. But it's only halfway toward state-of-the-art because it works like a single-elimination tournament, not a round robin tournament. In other words, the Robert's Rules procedure counts only some of the head-to-head majorities: when there are N alternatives, it counts N-1 majorities to eliminate N-1 alternatives.) After counting all of the head-to-head majorities of the complete round robin, the best way to construct the order of finish is to process the majorities one at a time, from largest majority to smallest majority, placing each majority's more-preferred alternative ahead of their less-preferred alternative in the order of finish. The largest-to-smallest processing order is in accord with the heuristic that underpins majority rule: "The larger the number of people who think x is better than y, the more likely it is that x is better than y, all else being equal." I've attached a screenshot of part of the webpage (before the voters' orders of preference are typed in). The text in the screenshot provides some additional information about the voting method.
- 5 replies
-
- login
- suspension
-
(and 6 more)
Tagged with: