Experiments for Decision Maker

Repo for experimenting with the instant-runoff voting algorithm I'd like to use for decision-maker.

Terminology

• "Candidate" - a possible choice in an election
• "Ballot" - a single voter's ranked list of candidates
• "Ballot pool" - all ballots submitted in an election
• "Slate" - a ranked list of candidates that multiple voters copy to create their ballots

Questions to consider

• Biggest question - does IRV avoid ties enough to be useful?
• How to handle the case where there are multiple candidates with the least number of votes in a single round?
  • Example: Candidate A has 4 votes, Candidate B has 3 votes, Candidate C and Candidate D both have 2 votes. Should both C and D be eliminated? Choose one at random?
• Should a candidate with exactly 50% of the vote be the winner, if the other 50% of votes are divided between different candidates?

Productionizing

If I have a workable IRV implementation, this code can be used as the base for a production version of a decision-maker site/app. I'd want to:

• Look at the various TODO items to clean up the code.
• Add assertions of various invariants.
• Potentially add property-based testing for Ballot class, instantRunoffVote function, to make sure invariants hold.