We’re not just your end users, we’re mostly all software developers too. “Stuff happens” to all of us, every frickin’ day . After decades of pain, we have infrastructure in place now that ensures almost no change can be made to Python’s main branch without first passing an extensive test suite on multiple platforms. Committing directly to main now is only done in dire emergencies - of which I can recall none.
And voting is open now. I clicked on everything possible to click on, and it all worked perfectly and smoothly (from all the hyperlinks to candidate nomination statements, to changing my initial vote).
So give it up for @EWDurbin and @ArendPeter! This is a first-rate voting experience .
@ArendPeter was sympathetic, but we agreed it was too late in our election cycle to risk material code changes on their end to populate ballots with our most recent ballot’s ratings.
There’s a technical challenge on their end: they never want to reveal ballot IDs (BIDs) to anyone (not even our election admin) except to voters, but election admins can, if necessary, do a dance to find out a voter’s voter ID (VID). They don’t want to reveal even that much, and if an admin does do that dance, an audit event saying they did so is left in the election record. But sometimes it’s necessary.
Anyway, to support populating “update” votes with the most recent ballot cast requires giving the service both your VID and your BID. It’s not yet clear to them how to do that without making the BID potentially visible to the admin (who must still be able, if needed, to find a voter’s VID).
I don’t believe it’s insurmountable. The email receipt you get already contains your VID and your BID, but in different links, and in theory it “should be easy” to construct a URL that contains both. But in practice I believe them when they say it’s not actually easy to work out all the details.
I agree it’s annoying. It’s also annoying to me that because “updating” effectively starts over from scratch, I usually see the candidate names in a different random order each time I update.
But that’s all minor compared to that we can change our votes.
My one minor UI suggestion is that the confirmation popup window could show your selections in order sorted from 5 starts to 0. The same with the web page you see when you click on the “verify your ballot” link.
Could be jarring, though. My short-term memory is still good enough to recall the order of the names I just finished assigning stars to, and it would throw me off balance to see the same names in a different order mere seconds later.
But then neither of us should ever be in charge of “human factors” design decisions
I had exactly the same response as Barry. I think showing them sorted by stars is helpful to give you another way to ponder whether this is how you want to vote.
Point taken! But consider then taking it to another level: Condorcet ballots can require imposing a total ordering on all candidates. On computers they typically have interactive ballots that allow “drag and dropping” candidates into the position you want them (and also “up” and “down” buttons to allow moving a candidate up or down by one position).
That’s not as extreme as it may sound here. The BetterVoting admin UI already contains an option to enable “draggable ballots” for IRV elections (which doesn’t yet appear to be an election method they actually support) - and IRV, aka “Ranked Choice” in the US - uses Condorcet ballots.
So they’re already thinking along those lines in a different context.
In theory, while we assign stars, they could reorder the ballot-so-far dynamically, from highest stars to lowest, with unassigned-so-far candidates all at the bottom.
Indeed, while I was filling out my “6 candidates, 6 different star assignments” SC ballot, I found it a bit of a struggle to keep scanning by eyeball to make sure I didn’t miss anyone, or unintentionally pass out the same number of stars twice. All of which would have been obvious at a glance instead if the ballot got reordered dynamically while I was assigning stars.
The confirmation after the ballot was cast would then exactly duplicate the order I left it in.
Since @ArendPeter gave a heart to that ambitious sketch, let me cut him a break .
@ArendPeter. I think we could get over 90% of the benefit with under 10% of the work if y’all just added a “Sort” button to a STAR ballot. When clicked, it would rearrange candidate lines from highest # of stars to lowest, with unrated-so-far candidates at the very bottom. In some ways that would even be a better UI; e.g., lines wouldn’t move around “by magic”, only when you asked them to move.
. After decades of pain, we have infrastructure in place now that ensures almost no change can be made to Python’s main branch without first passing an extensive test suite on multiple platforms. Committing directly to 
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