by Michael Ossipoff

A new 30-party poll on political party platforms has recently been started at the Condorcet Internet Voting Service. Please follow the link to the biggest political party platform poll on the internet. Democracy Chronicles’ Third Party Central page has descriptions of the parties in the poll and has links to each party’s platforms. Currently, the Greens/Green Party USA (G/GPUSA) is the winner of the poll. In an older poll (still up at the Condorcet Internet Voting Service (CIVS), with 41 votes, G/GPUSA comes in 2nd, after GPUS (the other Green Party).

This is a poll among 30 political party platforms. The ballot consists of a list of the 30 parties. It’s a rank-balloting poll. To the right of each party’s name is a pull-down menu of rank positions, by which you can assign a rank position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, …etc.) to each party you want to rank. The ones to which you don’t assign a rank number will all remain in last place. You can rank as many or as few parties as you choose to. You can rank more than one party at the same rank position if you choose to (if there are parties among whom you have no preference).

The poll’s official counting method, by which the rankings will be counted, will be Benham’s method. Here is the definition of Benham’s method (It starts with a definition of Instant Runoff (IRV), because Benham uses IRV):

It goes without saying that, based on #2 above, if there is an alternative that already beats each one of the other alternatives, even before any IRV is done, then that alternative wins, without any IRV being done. At CIVS, Benham’s method is referred to as Condorcet-IRV. Benham’s method was chosen for this poll because it meets the Mutual Majority Criterion that means that it guarantees that if a majority of the voters all prefer a certain same set of alternatives to all of the other alternatives, and vote sincerely, then the winner must come from that set that they prefer to all the others.

Additionally, there is no “chicken dilemma”. Methods that have the chicken dilemma can’t benefit from meeting the Mutual Majority Criterion. Additionally, an ideal compromise alternative, one that beats each one of the other alternatives, will always win. That avoids dis-satisfied majorities, and extends to all voters the strategic freedom to vote sincerely.

When someone wants to check the poll’s results-so-far, that person would select “results”, at the bottom of the voting page. That takes you to the results page, where, at the upper right, is a menu of count-methods. “Schulze” is the default. In that menu, select Condorcet-IRV, in order for the page to display the results of a Benham/Condorcet-IRV count.

The results will be displayed a little lower on that page. The results are displayed in the form of an ‘output ranking” of the alternatives. That’s a ranking that shows the “finishing-order” of the alternatives, as described below:

That output ranking is gotten by first finding the winner, and giving it 1st position in the output ranking. Then, among the other alternatives (the ones that haven’t won yet), the method is applied again, and the winner is given 2nd position in the output ranking…and so on. Repeatedly, the Benham count is applied to the alternatives that haven’t won yet, and the winner gets the next position in the output ranking.

Below that, there is an option to add more details. If that option is chosen, then a pairwise-defeats matrix will be displayed. It shows which alternatives beat which other alternatives, and by how much.

I encourage everyone to vote in our poll.

(I should add that a message that consists of part of this article is included at the voting page of this poll, but that, due to a formatting misunderstanding, it has lost its paragraph-separating-spaces. Disregard it, because this article says all that is in that message, and more.)