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In this simulated election of a five-seat council, little stick figures  show the positions of voters. The ones with huge heads are the candidates.
Simulations show the LER voting rule is the best way to represent the center and all sides. Here it elects Al then Bev, Di, Fred, and Joe. (Labeled in bold)
A Condorcet Series elects the 5 candidates nearest the central voter: Al, Bev, Fred, GG, and Joe. Nobody in the lower-right wins so the council cannot balance around the central voter. Bloc vote and Borda's rule elect the same off-center council.
The STV winners? Bev, Di, Fred, GG, and Joe. No Al! Only LER has Condorcet centering with STV balancing!
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Take The Wraps Off Political Sim
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PoliticalSim was created to make the power of voting rules easy to understand through visual displays. You don't need to do the tallies. You don't need to calculate statistics. The merits of Condorcet or PR or both together are easy to see and explain in everyday terms: consistently central, or evenly spread out, or centrally balanced.
You can develop an intuitive feel for statistical patterns by playing with them. You can put voters in random, normal, uniform, or checkerboard patterns. You can spread the candidates out wide or cluster them near the center, developing a feel for "standard deviation" as you play.
Students, Activists, Professors and Pollsters: In addition to games that teach some political science and statistics, PoliticalSim creates slide shows for lectures. Users can record and recall the voters, candidates and winning positions from typical and unusual simulations.
The sim can record charts of voters' top choices for each step in a LER or STV tally. It also calculates a council's "utility" score and the percentages of voters with their first, second or third choices elected. These statistics and more can be recorded from the results of several rules over many elections and later analyzed.
Voting Rules!
PoliticalSim allows voting by all the widely used rules such as Australia's STV, Japan's SNTV, Finland's list PR, USA's open primary, England's plurality and France's runoff; plus limited, cumulative, and the often illegal bloc voting rules. You may add your own rules in Excel spreadsheets or macros. It runs in Excel versions 4 through 2000 on PCs and Macs. Notes
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Each of these compressed files is self-extracting. After you download one to a disk, double click its icon, to uncompress it. It will put a PoliticalSim folder on your disk. You can tell it where to put the folder or move it later, but do not change the name. Look in that folder to open PoliticalSim.xls. (Excel 4 limits names to 8.3 letters so the folder is called Politicl.Sim and the file is Poli_Sim.xlm.)
Other Free Downloads
Election software PolyVote tallies many voting rules. Its controls are simpler than PoliticalSim's because PolyVote cannot run games, demonstrations or research. Like PoliticalSim, it is an "open source" program so programmers can correct errors and add features. Windows PoliVote.exe Macintosh PoliVote.sea
Allocation software requires Excel 5 or higher. To set and budget one-time projects. FS_Sim_S tally and 30 ballots in spreadsheets: Server 1
PolyFund tallies fair-share spending rules with programs that include highly-interactive ballots.
Budget Influence Points let up to 100 voters set ongoing budgets for departments, trade votes and watch the changes as they happen. Read_Me.doc has instructions for installing. Macintosh and Windows, Free, Open source in Excel 5 through XP, © 2000-2003. about 440KB. Download ballots and tally program for setting up to 50 budgets.
Download ballots and tally program for setting over 50 budgets.
Printouts of a concise 9-page article on the best voting rules are easier to study than the screen versions. Your choice of:
Rich Text Format for most word processors ElectRTF.zip
Word 4 or higher on Macintosh ElectMac.zip
Adobe Acrobat 2.1 Elect.pdf
Voting rules explained The Accurate Democracy web site describes the political tendencies and tally methods for most voting rules included in PoliticalSim.
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A Partial Map to Accurate Democracy
The concepts build from one voting situation to the next.
This web site looks at all of them, from nominations to funding.
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Ballot
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Notes: An Excel sheet can hold 65,000 real or simulated voters and 250 candidates. But computer memory usually limits the numbers of candidates and voters to a tenth of those figures.
Why Excel? Voting tallies are number crunching, so we want a language designed for that. We want a language that is simple and that many people know how to read and write, with programming tools and help widely available. PoliticalSim does a great deal with simple spreadsheets and the Excel macros which use spreadsheet formulas. |
The download file includes a user's manual with voting-rule definitions. It is about 1500K zipped, 3100K uncompressed. (The zip file without the "Cities" folder fits on 1 floppy disk.)
The last maintenance update was on 2001-06-16. Startup support is available by email. If your version of Excel gives an error message simply click "continue", and please tell us. Programmers can fix bugs and add features because this is "open source" software. If you find a bug, please report it. This sim is a modular program and bugs are very easy to fix. Back
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Thanks to all those whose feedback has improved PoliticalSim.
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