Aron Griffis wrote:[Wed Apr 27 2005, 09:48:40PM EDT]
> If we were to go ahead with a Condorcet election, then each voter
> would need to rank the candidates rather than simply voting yes or no.

Ranking could be pretty simple to implement like this:

(1) Provide an executable /usr/local/bin/ballot on dev.gentoo.org that
    would create an appropriately umasked file ~/.ballot and dump into
    it a randomized list of the candidates.

        $ ballot --new
        Please edit ~/.ballot, putting your first choice at the top,
        second choice on the second line, down to your last choice on
        the bottom line.

(2) After editing, the user would then verify they didn't screw up the
    edit by running ballot again.
        
        $ ballot --check
        Looks good!  Please leave ~/.ballot in place until after the
        election is concluded.

            or

        $ ballot --check
        Your ballot is missing the following candidates: ...
        etc.

(3) When the election is finished, we'd use another script to collect
    all the votes and generate the listing to put into the Condorcet
    calculator.

I'd volunteer to write "ballot".

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer