We had 12 candidates for the Debian Stretch Artwork and a survey was set up for allowing people to vote which one they prefer.
The survey was run in my LimeSurvey instance, surveys.larjona.net. LimeSurvey its a nice free software with a lot of features. It provides a “Ranking” question type, and it was very easy for allowing people to “vote” in the Debian style (Debian uses the Condorcet method in its elections).
However, although LimeSurvey offers statistics and even graphics to show the results of many type of questions, its output for the Ranking type is not useful, so I had to export the data and use another tool to find the winner.
Export the data from LimeSurvey
I’ve created a read-only user to visit the survey site. With this visitor you can explore the survey questionnaire, its results, and export the data.
Username: stretch
Password: artwork
First attempt, the quick and easy (and nonfree, I guess)
The steps I followed to feed the tool with the data from LimeSurvey were these:
1.- Went to admin interface of lime survey, selected the stretch artwork survey, responses and statistics, export results to application
2.- Selected “Completed responses only”, “Question codes”, “Answer codes”, and exported to CSV. (results_stretch1.csv)
3.- Opened the CSV with LibreOffice Calc, and removed these columns:
id submitdate lastpage startlanguage
4.- Remove the first row containing the headers and saved the result (results_stretch2.csv)
5.- In commandline:
sort results_stretch2.csv | uniq -c > results_stretch3.csv
6.- Opened results_stretch3.csv with LibreOffice Calc and “merge delimitors” when importing.
7.- Removed the first column (blank) and added a column between the numbers and the first ranked option, and fulfilled that column with “:” value. Saved (results_stretch4.csv)
8.- Opened results_stretch4.csv with my preferred editor and search and replace “,:,” for “:” and after that, search and replace “,” for “>”. Save the result (results_stretch5.csv)
9.- Went to http://condorcet.ericgorr.net/, selected Condorcet basic, “tell me some things”, and pasted the contents of results_stretch5.csv there.
The results are in results_stretch1.html
But where is the source code of this Condorcet tool?
I couldn’t find the source code (nor license) of the solver by Eric Gorr.
The tool is mentioned in http://www.accuratedemocracy.com/z_tools.htm where other tools are listed and when the tool is libre software, is noted so. But not in this case.
There, I found another tool, VoteEngine, which is open source, so I tried with that.
Second attempt: VoteEngine, a Free Open Source Software tool made with Python
I used a modification of voteengine-0.99 (the original zip is available in http://vote.sourceforge.net/ and a diff with the changes I made (basically, Numeric -> numpy and Int -> int, inorder that works in Debian stable), here.
Steps 1 to 4 are the same as in the first attempt.
5.- Sorted alphabetically the different 12 options to vote, and
assigned a letter to each one (saved the assignments in a file called
6.- Opened results_stretch2.csv with my favorite editor, and search
and replace the name of the different options, for their corresponding
letter in stretch_key.txt file.
Searched and replaced “,” for ” ” (space). Then, saved the results into
the file results_stretch3_voteengine.txt
7.- Copied the input.txt file from voteengine-0.99 into stretch.txt and edited the options
to our needs. Pasted the contents of results_stretch3_voteengine.cvs
at the end of stretch.txt
8.-In the commandline
./voteengine.py <stretch.txt > winner.txt
(winner.txt contains the results for the Condorcet method).
9.- I edited again stretch.txt to change the method to shulze and
calculated the results, and again with the smith method. The winner in
the 3 methods is the same. I pasted the summary of these 3 methods
(shulze and smith provide a ranked list) in stretch_results.txt
If it can be done, it can be done with R…
I found the algstat R package:
which includes a “condorcet” function but I couldn’t make it work with the data.
I’m not sure how the data needs to be shaped. I’m sure that this can be done in R and the problem is me, in this case. Comments are welcome, and I’ll try to ask to a friend whose R skills are better than mine!
And another SaaS
I found https://www.condorcet.vote/ and its source code. It would be interesting to deploy a local instance to drive future surveys, but for this time I didn’t want to fight with PHP in order to use only the “solver” part, nor install another SaaS in my home server just to find that I need some other dependency or whatever.
I’ll keep an eye on this, though, because it looks like a modern and active project.
Finally, devotee
Well and which software Debian uses for its elections?
There is a git repository with devotee, you can clone it:
I found that although the tool is quite modular, it’s written specifically for the Debian case (votes received by mail, GPG signed, there is a quorum, and other particularities) and I was not sure if I could use it with my data. It is written in Perl and then I understood it worse than the Python from VoteEngine.
Maybe I’ll return to it, though, when I have more time, to try to put our data in the shape of a typicall tally.txt file and then see if the module solving the condorcet winner can work for me.
That’s all, folks! (for now…)
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