election-methods@mailman.electorama.com

Technical discussion of election methods

View all threads

Who is the median voter? A calculator

KV
Kevin Venzke
Thu, Mar 30, 2023 5:00 PM

Hello,

I threw together a calculator containing a couple of ideas on guessing the identity (or a
best possible identity) of the "median voter" given cast rank ballots:

votingmethods.net/median

One idea is just an adaptation of Ranked Pairs to select a voter instead of a candidate.

The other is to first define a distance metric for any two ballots. Then starting from a
random ballot, consume nearest other ballots continually until a majority is reached. Do
all this repeatedly and check which ballot was brought into the majority the most often.

I may try to come up with more ideas, but I thought two was enough.

Kevin
votingmethods.net

Hello, I threw together a calculator containing a couple of ideas on guessing the identity (or a best possible identity) of the "median voter" given cast rank ballots: votingmethods.net/median One idea is just an adaptation of Ranked Pairs to select a voter instead of a candidate. The other is to first define a distance metric for any two ballots. Then starting from a random ballot, consume nearest other ballots continually until a majority is reached. Do all this repeatedly and check which ballot was brought into the majority the most often. I may try to come up with more ideas, but I thought two was enough. Kevin votingmethods.net