Voting methods and practical applications.

[MichaelEvans]

Since I keep hearing it from time to time, and think a bit of explanation and education are in order I'll start this topic.

First, some background material.  I was part of the team working under Jeff to create an interface for the website that would record the votes for the mascot contest.  (This was in a staff area and tied to staff accounts to prevent vote tampering.  Heck, if the board wanted we could tie voting rights for this to registration if a sufficient system were in place.  Not Irremediably difficult, but it should be explored now if there's that desire, the longer we wait, the more difficult it becomes to have the proper elements in place without additional expense/contacts with the registrants.)  The process used for actual tabulation of the votes was the Schulze Method (known by many other names).

Now, for an example experiment.  I'll give ~2 weeks for anyone to reply to this thread with a vote, and put the data together, then feed it to several possible voting algorithms and see what the result is.

You may vote/revote (revise your vote), until 7pm PST, on Wed the 22nd of October 2007.   I may provide early projected results before that point, and will simply encourage anyone who wants to cast a vote to vote.

Also, write in candidates are allowed, I'll even try to add them to the list here at the start of the post at semi-irregular intervals.

Candidates for Favourite Anime (format follows this list).

• A - Akira
• B - Bleach
• C - Card Captor Sakura
• D - Dragon Ball (anything)
• E - Gundam (any series)
• F - Hellsing
• G - Inuyasha
• H - Kenshin
• I - Naruto
• J - Noein
• K - Slayers (anything)
• L - Sailor Moon

The format is that you will produce two ballots, one for how you'd vote under these conditions. First ballot; each vote on a line is rated at equal value, subsequent lines have less value (You may leave candidates unranked).  Second ballot; one single line, first preference first, second, third, etc in sequence until you're done ranking candidates you want to rank.

Here are my votes (which are OK examples)

Sharable Ranks:
A F H J
B G I K
C D E L

Ranked:
F H J A K B I G C L E D

Here is another example of how voting Could look (this vote won't be counted as my vote, nor shall I include it unless someone happens to vote it.  Yes there are slight inconsistancies in the two, this is more to show formatting).

Sharable Ranks:
J F
H
A B G I
C D E L

Ranked:
F H J A B I G C L E D

(Firefox has English - US first... but favourite has a U in it?)

[MichaelEvans]

So far, only I've posted a vote... Is no one interested in seeing the different outcomes?  Did I pick a bad topic to vote on?  Or should I table this until the beta-test phase of next year's voting system? (More for stress/real world testing, since we're likely to interface to a database over a flat file and probably alter the storage format of the vote.)

[DancingTofu]

As someone who watches very little anime, and has only watched 3 of the 12 animes listed, and all a rather long time ago, I don't feel qualified to vote on the subject, but if you'd like, I can BS a vote simply to test the method.

[MichaelEvans]

Actually I only listed any Anime I'd heard of that could be popular or I saw mentioned someplace (like the auctions) at Kumoricon.  I think I've seen enough of all but three to place votes properly.  I also wanted a topic that was more likely to have grey area, room for opinion over fact and related to interests those attending might have.  Also, most of the Anime listed have been, or are being, shown on standard cable TV (though you might have needed to be watching it from the mid 90s on...).