IEVS: Computer simulation and comparison of different election methods

Many single-winner election methods have been proposed besides the kind, called “plurality voting,” most-used in the USA. The most well known are Approval Voting, Instant Runoff, Range Voting, Borda, and Condorcet methods. This proposal is to fund me to continue to build IEVS (Infinitely Extendible Election Simulator), a public-source program currently downloadable from the http://RangeVoting.org website. IEVS quantitatively compares different election methods using the objective “Bayesian Regret” methodology. It is already by far the best election simulator in the world – e.g. the only one that simultaneously is public source, has by far the most election methods, the most voter strategies, the most utility generators, the only one with graphical output capability, etc. The benefits to humanity of understanding the Bayesian regret of election methods are large. Specifically, IEVS shows that simply replacing Plurality by Range Voting would yield a comparable improvement to humanity’s lot, as was caused by the invention of democracy (e.g. switching from Random Winner to Plurality) in the first place. To put a rough number on it, about 5500 lives are unnecessarily lost for each day that goes by without adopting Range Voting. The benefit of this reform is huge and the cost is tiny. So it is worth funding this investigation..