Animated Voting Methods

Описание: In 2006, Ka-Ping Yee introduced a way to examine single-winner election methods via computer graphics (see: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/). Each colored circle represents a candidate in a 3- or 4-candidate election in a two-dimensional political space. The color of the background represents which candidate would win under each method if a randomized electorate, centered at that point, were to vote.

Yee's diagrams show some serious pathologies with the plurality and instant runoff methods, but it is unclear from his descriptions whether these were frequent occurrences, or chosen specifically to make those methods appear worse than they are.

This video follows on Yee's work by animating the positions of the candidates in the two-dimensional political space, and adds Score Voting, Star Voting aka Score Runoff Voting and a one-voter "ideal winner" model. Where plurality and IRV tend to squeeze out candidates in the center, Score tends to give an advantage to candidates who are positioned in between other candidates. Score Runoff Voting (aka Star Voting) consistently performs closest to the ideal model of the systems visualized.

Simulation Notes:
Each pixel represents an election of 4,096 voters in a random radial Gaussian distribution around the "center of public opinion" at that point. Voters vote using the following rules:

Plurality: vote for the nearest candidate
IRV: rank the candidates in order of increasing distance
Score: score the closest candidate 5, the furthest candidate 0, and the others scaled along that spectrum
SRV: score the closest candidate a 5, the furthest candidate 0, and the others scaled from 1-4 based on distance between nearest and furthest
One voter: pick the candidate closest to the center of public opinion

The source code for generating these animations is available at https://github.com/nardo/Equal.Vote/t...