Separate standards for ranked vs. scored ballots?

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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Separate standards for ranked vs. scored ballots? #7

Closed carlschroedl closed 3 years ago

carlschroedl commented 3 years ago

Scores and ranks are different. Should different standards exist for each?

robla commented 3 years ago

I'm excited about having a single format that supports scores and ranks. I see no reason to remove one or the other from ABIF. Is there any of the current testcases you would prefer to invalidate?

brainbuz commented 3 years ago

I think the file format should support all ballot types well. It will need to define multiple data types. Ranked Ballots can be represented as Scored Ballots where the best score is low instead of high, which also immediately supports equal ranking. One of the consensus goals is hand editing and these two formats for ranked ballots seem the most natural A>B>C # Ranked A=D>C>E=Y>F # Ranked permit equal vs scored format: A/1:B/2:C/3 A/1:C/2:D/1:E/3:F/4:Y/3

simberaj commented 3 years ago

I am putting my effort into this precisely because it aims to represent all ballot types:

Approval: A, B, C (simple plurality votes are a subset of this)
Ranked: A>B=C>D
Scored: A/1, B/4, C/3, D/2.

A single file should (RFC MUST) contain only one of these types of ballots, but otherwise, I think no additional markup should be added to specify which type is used.

robla commented 3 years ago

Consensus seems to be that ABIF should be able to handle both ranked and scored ballots, so I'm going to close this one out.