[ABIF] seems similar to the format that is used by the tool which the Debian
Technical Committee uses.
I'm personally not involved with Devotee, but the format seems
straightforward and I can't see any reason from the sidelines why at
least an output file in that format couldn't be done...
I may wrap my head around the devotee codebase at some point and try adding ABIF support to it at some point. We'll see....
[...]
> A particularly interesting Debian Project Leader result from a few
> years ago is this one:
> [3]https://abif.electorama.com/id/DPL2003
> Note that awt tabulates the DPL2003 results not only using Condorcet,
> but it also tabulates using "instant-runoff voting" (also known as
> "IRV" or "RCV" as it's called in the United States). What's
> interesting about the DPL2003 election is that Condorcet methods and
> IRV result in different results. Pretty much all of the other
> elections that the Debian community has had have resulted in the same
> Condorcet vs IRV winner. Election nerds (like me) find DPL2003
> fascinating.
That is fascinating. When I looked at the Condorcet results, my initial
assumption (before I scrolled down) was that Bdale Garbee (who defeated
everyone except the eventual winner, Martin Michlmayr) would be the IRV
winner.
It turns out it's actually Branden Robinson who would win using IRV, and
he only defeated Moshe Zadka in Condorcet.
In IRV, NOTA is eliminated in the first round, Moshe Zadka in the
second, and then with the removal of those ballots, somehow Branden
defeats both Martin Michlmayr and Bdale Garbee...
I'd encourage you to look at
https://abif.electorama.com/id/DPL2003 again, since I think you're misreading/misstating it. The only matchup that Moshe Zadka won in 2003 was against "None Of The Above" in a pairwise comparison (not considering any of the other alternatives). I doubt there are any methods that Zadka would have won under that have serious support in the electoral reform community.
Shortly after sending my email to this list, I posted a longer writeup of my observations of the election on /r/Debian:
The thing that makes the IRV/RCV results so crazy is that there's a tie in the penultimate round of counting. The San Francisco RCV rules (which are likely not unique to SF) say that when there's a tie for the fewest number of votes in any round, then both candidates should be simultaneously dropped, and their ballots should be transferred to the remaining candidates.
One thing I forgot to do in my email last week: plug the new election-software mailing list:
I'm hoping that all of us in the election-software community can come together and build a coherent and interoperable collection election-software libraries and applications, rather than the tangled mess of non-interoperable applications that make post-facto election analysis extremely difficult, and make holding secure and sensible elections difficult. Please join!
Rob