James Gilmour: wrote > > Maybe there are 4 million possibilities with 10 candidates, > but you won't have 4 million actual combinations unless you > have many more voters than 4 million.
I was going to mention this as well. From a practical standpoint, one only need record the "forms" of ballots actually cast, then for each new ballot see if it's "form" is already stored, and if so just add 1 to the number of voters who used that "form". > > In the STV-PR 2002 election in Meath (Ireland) for which the > full ballot "papers" are available electronically, there > were 14 candidates for 5 places, so there were about 2.4 > ×10^11 possible combinations of preferences. However, there > were only 64,081 voters, so the practical maximum was 64,081. > But in fact, those 64,081 voters marked only 25,101 > unique sets of preferences. The most common preference list > appeared on 1,618 ballots. > > Of course, this won't help if you are trying to develop an > "all possible combinations matrix". Just ininitializing an "all possible configurations" could be daunting. But the method I described above can be done efficiently enough to run on a laptop in a few seconds. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
