Re: [STV-discuss] Ballot file enhancements

[Jeffrey O'N. <jc...@co...>]

Dear Jay,

No this is not an oft-asked question, and I'm glad to help as much as I can.

Before I respond in detail to what you wrote, have you considered
entering the ballots through the pSTV (which will be named OpenSTV in
the next release) program?  I think this would be significantly easier
than entering the ballots in Excel (try the auto rank feature).  It
would be straightforward to have a second person check the ballots
with pSTV too.  If the current ballot entry dialog does not meet your
needs, perhaps your programmers could instead adapt pSTV's ballot
entry code to suit your needs rather than convert an excel file?  I am
willing to provide assistance, but I am mostly unavailable until
October.

> Of course, you can see the obvious first problem:  Excel could output
> a "Raw" file, but lines would be comma-separated, not space-
> separated.  Now, clever use of Unix 'tr' could solve the problem, but
> this requires we have a Unix dweeb around.

I bet excel has an option to export csv files with other delimeters.
I only have OpenOffice and I think it does this (at least it reads
files with other delimiters).

> There's a second problem I'd like to see solved, too:  We'll only
> have around 50 or so votes (for 5 seats), and historically we've
> recorded the name of the voting member alongside their votes.  If we
> put this info into the spreadsheet, it would introduce info into the
> input file that OpenSTV would barf on.

Yes, it would barf, and I agree this would be useful information to
have in the ballot file.

> 1)  Do you foresee any significant difficulties with modifying the
> ballot-file-reading code to read a source ballot file that use comma-
> separated entries on lines (vs. spaces)?

This would be the code for reading raw files.  I don't see any
problems as long as the candidate names are alphanumeric.

> 2)  Do you foresee any significant difficulties with modifying the
> ballot-file-reading code to ignore everything on a line after the
> standard Python comment indicator is encountered (#) (so we could,
> e.g. put a #member-name into the last column on a line in Excel)?

I see no problems.

> 3)  Assuming I have these changes implemented, is this code you are
> interested in enough that you'd like us to feed the changes back into
> the open source code base?

Possibly.  Generally, I like to limit the number of available ballot
formats to avoid confusion.  The next ballot format I would like to
add would be an xml one, but I have yet to see a good one.  If your
code is very useful, easy to use, and would appeal to a wide audience,
then I would want to add it to OpenSTV.

I hope this helps,
Jeff O'Neill