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electorama / abif

The _Aggregated Ballot Information Format_ provides a concise, aggregated, text-based document to describe the ballots cast in range-based or ranked elections, as well as approval-based and choose-one balloting systems.
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Allow fractional vote counts? #10

Closed simberaj closed 3 years ago

simberaj commented 3 years ago

Do we want to allow non-integer vote counts in ABIF? E.g. this

1.5: A>B=C

would be a valid ABIF line.

If so, do we want decimal numbers, or even fractions such as

1/3: A>B=C

?

robla commented 3 years ago

Oh, the wily fractional vote! We all know how difficult it is to express fractions (like 1/3) using decimal numbers.

I don't know the answer. My gut tells me the best answer is to maybe allow for decimal notation (e.g 0.333: A>B=C) and then maybe encourage specific implementations that want to allow for vote splitting that isn't expressed cleanly in decimal notation to have a custom "vote denominator" field in the header. But I'm not sure. I think initial implementations (like anything that I write) is going to only deal with whole votes that can be expressed as integers.

brainbuz commented 3 years ago

I recommend leaving this for a later time. 

In ABIF 1.0 the count must be an integer. If a need is
demonstrated for fractional and decimal count values, 
this will need to be addressed by a later revision.
simberaj commented 3 years ago

Agreed, closing this. I'll update the votelib code accordingly.