Matthew Welland wrote:
I consider it very bad to have to use a computer at all. Any system that requires a computer to be easy to use gets a zero vote from me.
You could have the computer as a purely optional step. Let the voter go through "is candidate A better, equally good, or worse than B?" if the voter can't determine the rank on his own, and then the computer prints out a ballot with ranks consistent with the voter's choice. The voter can then submit that ballot as he would a ballot he had ranked manually.
I think that most voters would be able to determine their preference rank directly, without such a machine, but the machine could be available to those who wouldn't.
In this system I hope the items I left off the ballot were given a "zero" value? The range thing where a no vote was not the same as a zero vote gets a zero vote from me. Also, in this system how do I give two or more candidates equal ranking?
All reasonable ranked ballot methods support truncation (i.e. leaving off candidates you don't want to rank). Voting methods that don't, tend to get patched up with how-to-vote cards and a subsequent degradation into party list because the voters aren't willing to rank oodles of candidates. See the Australian IRV elections for an example of this.
The standard for Condorcet methods is also that the candidates that you don't rank will be ranked equally last - below all candidates that you *do* rank, but equal to each other. Thus, if you rank candidate A above B above C but don't have any opinion about candidates D-Z, you don't have to add all the remaining candidates to your ballot as ranked below C, at the same rank; simply not marking the ranks of candidates D-Z will have the same effect.
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