Indablog

Two people have tried the system so far, and both had good suggestions for improvements. Neither found it intuitve, but they both got it after a brief explanation. Nothing blew up, which is a good thing, of course.

There’s still a little issue about how the results sort out on the bottom line of a Round Pair. For any candidates receiving reallocated votes, I want his/her own votes to show first from the left. Right now, it’s not happening reliably. To complicate matters, there might be situations where there are no votes being carried forward, and the candidate’s presence on a runoff row is simply a result of someone else being eliminated immediately below. In that case, I have to evaluate what’s in the top line of the Round Pair, and handle it accordingly.

I’m handling lots of the detail and labeling of the Irving Chart in PHP by passing arrays from the function that builds the Ballot histogram (It shows second, but it runs first). It looks tricky and convoluted, but I think it will help perfomance by minimizing calls to the back end database. I’ll pass another select, if need be, but I’ll resist the temptation as long as I can.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that I’ll have to create separate Irving Tables for each election. Right now, a single table gets truncated and repopulated each time a ballot posts. I tried an update routine, but it was bombing, and I learned too late that it may have been because the host was having problems that day rather than because of my own foolishness (always a likely culprit if something isn’t working correctly).

Filed under: Development Chronicles