Voting System vote interaction

One of the design parts of the voting system that is likely to make a serious difference to useage is the interaction of the preference ordering. It is only a little thing but one that I think I must get right. I spent quite a while getting the interaction like this:

http://process.gianticebox.co.uk/htmldev/vote1/

I think the dragging is more proactive than just checkboxes or radio buttons. Also the dragging makes clear that you can/need to select more than one answer. The system also allows you to not have preference for something.

I also started on the results section. I think that the data from all the votes should be openly available in the same place that the votes take place. Either each round of voting or the stacked bar chart from the final two options should be shown. This will be a technical matter I suppose, if the data is exported on each round in a format that is sensible. Anyhow I started having a go at using some graphing APIs; you can see my results here [it is a bit slow tho]

http://process.gianticebox.co.uk/htmldev/vote1/archive.html

Voting System w/ Sheena

So I had my crit with Sheena today about the voting system. It was good to have a general discussion about the project, but unfortunately a lot of the talk ended up being about domestic party politics. This is somewhat unsurprizing and I don’t make it any better as I am always happy to talk about that, but this project is not about that.

This is a clearly political project, but it is not about domestic politics. I want the voting system be to about the use of one kind of democracy in certain groups. I know that there are a great many arguements to make and have about voting systems, I am aware of these and accept them as part of democracy in action; all people have different views. However I want to make a system to benifit those who know these arguements and want to use an AV voting system to find a consensus decision with one answer from many options.

I looked at the Campaign for Electoral Reform website only just before I went to see Sheena; I should probably have looked earlier.