Week 4: Adapting the Voting Methods
April 9, 2024
Welcome back to my blog! This week, I finalized adapting the voting systems that I described in last week’s blog. As I said, I had to make a few assumptions when adapting the voting systems to the needs of my simulation, so in this blog, I’ll be detailing the decisions I made.
The Schulze and plurality with runoff voting methods were already designed to work with truncated ballots, so luckily I didn’t have to modify either of them. I did, however, have to modify Bucklin and Coombs.
Bucklin, as explained last week, decides its winner by continuously adding first, then second, then third preferences, and so on, until a candidate reaches a majority(>50%) of votes. When working with truncated ballots, it’s possible that a majority won’t be reached after tallying up every preference, so I needed to slightly change the decision mechanism. My Bucklin implementation follows the voting system’s normal behavior unless every ballot’s preference has been tallied, at which point, the candidates that have a plurality of votes(the most votes, but not necessarily >50%) win.
When adapting Coombs, I had to make many more assumptions. As you may recall, Coombs checks for a candidate with a majority of votes, but then defaults to eliminating the candidates with the highest number of last place votes. With truncated ballots, however, does one consider the last ranked candidate on the ballot the last place candidate, or are the candidates that were ignored considered last place? Voting theorists have differing stances on the topics, but after consulting various opinions and considering my simulation, I decided that the candidates that were ignored, or not ranked on the ballot, were considered to be last place. After deciding that, the rest of the voting system worked as usual.
The voting systems are now all designed to work with truncated ballots, meaning that I can move onto the next step. There are still a few more processes that I have to work out until I can run the simulation and start generating data, but I’m happy with my progress so far!
Reader Interactions
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Great job making up all the voting systems to work with truncated ballots! All the voting systems seem to be very interesting. I can’t wait to hear about the next steps you take.
Thank you!
I must say that it is quite interesting to see how you have seamlessly adapted various voting systems to work with truncated ballots for your simulation. Also, your explanation of the modifications made to Bucklin and Coombs provides valuable insight into the challenges of implementing these systems. I can’t wait to hear more!
Thanks!
I wonder what issues you will come across as the data progresses? Which system will prove viability?
So far, my project has been progressing relatively smoothly, so I do expect some future hiccups. It is possible that I made too many assumptions with the various voting methods. We’ll have to see though. In terms of which system will prove to be viable, I don’t know just yet. But that’s why im studying it!