PoliticalSim

Political

Sim lets players test many types of voting. From Australia to old Zuidland there are many ways to elect reps. Each country's voting rule creates hot spots for players on the electoral field. But those strong positions might move if we change the voting rule. Some rules elect only centrists, some elect moderates, and some are just erratic.

PoliticalSim allows voting by all the widely used rules such as Australia's STV, Japan's SNTV, Finland's list PR, USA's open primary, England's plurality and France's runoff; plus limited, cumulative, and the often illegal bloc voting rules.

Simulated voters rank the candidates, giving 1st choice to the closest, 2nd choice to the 2nd closest, and so on. Their positions on the screen may represent geography or political opinions.

Games: Players take the roles of party leaders positioning rival candidates to maximize support. Moving a candidate requires paying for ads and answering interview questions can win donations.

Elections for research or fun may have 2 to 16 candidates, competing for 1 to 7 seats.

Voting Rules!

Several Rules', Typical Councils on 2D Electoral Field

Compare Three Councils

In this simulated election of a five-seat council, little stick figures

show the positions of voters. The huge heads are the candidates.

1) Simulations show that Ensemble Rules are the best way to represent the center and all sides. Here LER elects Al then Bev, Di, Fred, and Joe. (Each winner's name is in bold.)

2) A Condorcet Series elects the 5 candidates nearest the central voter: Al, Bev, Fred, GG, and Joe. There is no rep from the lower-right, so the council cannot balance around the central voter. Bloc vote and Borda's rule elect the same off-center council. (Each name is in italic.)

3) The Single Transferable Vote winners? Bev, Di, Fred, GG, and Joe. (Each name is underlined.) STV did not elect Al!

Only LER has Condorcet centering with Single Transferable Vote balancing!

Take The Wraps Off PoliticalSim

Political

Sim was created to make the power of voting rules easy to understand through visual displays. You don't need to do the tallies. You don't need to calculate statistics. The merits of Condorcet rules or Proportional Representation or both together are easy to see and explain in everyday terms: consistently central, or evenly spread out, or centrally balanced.

You can develop an intuitive feel for statistical patterns by playing with them. You can put voters in random, normal, uniform, or checkerboard patterns. You can spread the candidates out wide or cluster them near the center, developing a feel for "standard deviation" as you play.

Students, Activists, Professors and Pollsters: In addition to games that teach some political science and statistics, Political

Sim creates slide shows for lectures. Users can record and recall the voters, candidates and winning positions from typical and unusual simulations.

The sim can record charts of voters' top choices for each step in a LER or STV tally. It also calculates a council's "utility" score and the percentages of voters with their first, second or third choices elected. These statistics and more can be recorded from the results of several rules over many elections and later analyzed.

Download PoliticalSim

Windows Excel 4 through 7 use PolSim4.exe
Windows Excel 97 to 2008 use PoliticalSim.exe
Any Excel 4 through 7 use PolSim4.zip
Any Excel 97 to 2008 use PoliticalSim.zip

Most of these compressed files are self-extracting. (Versions with a name that ends with "zip" need a program such as WinZip or SuffIt.) After you download one to a disk, double click its icon, to uncompress it. It will put a PoliticalSim folder on your disk. You can tell it where to put the folder or move it later, but do not change the name. Look in that folder to open Poli_Sim.xlm or PoliticalSim.xls. (Excel 4 limits names to 8.3 letters so the folder is called Politicl.Sim.)

Open the file called Poli_Sim.xlm
Pull down the Elect menu to Cast Ballots.
Pull down the Elect menu to Tally Votes.
You've just run your first Political Sim!

A Guide for New Users is online.

Other Free Downloads

Fair-share allocation software: For fair-share spending to select and budget one-time events and projects, use a Moveable Money Votes tally:
This simulation game needs Excel 5 or higher: FairShareSim.xls.
An interactive ballot shows an advanced algorithm.

Printouts on the voting rules are easier to study than the screen pages. You may choose either a terse 9 page article in black and white elect.pdf — or a concise 28 page primer with color pictures.

Voting rules explained: The Accurate Democracy web site describes the political tendencies and tally methods for most voting rules included in PoliticalSim.

Chair	Reps	Council	Policy	Projects	Budgets
A Partial Map to Accurate Democracy The concepts build from one voting situation to the next. This web site looks at all of them, from nominations to funding.
Ballot Pictorial Tally Runoff Tactics Districts	Merits Women STV Visual STV Pictorial 2 2D charts	Merits Merits 2 CW+STV Notes Seats Shares	Motions Ballots Tactics Cycles Other Amend	Uses Need Notes Ballot Tally LAR	Ballot Coalitions Other Medians HZ Points Cards

Humor 8 for politicians: According to Clare Boothe Luce,
“_______ has done more to cause the social unrest of the
20th century than any other single factor.”
1) Revolution, 2) Democracy, 3) Socialism, 4) Advertising ?

PoliticalSim has hundreds of interview questions.
A sample appears in the on-line game Quotes and Authors.

Notes: Why Excel? Voting tallies are number crunching, so we want a language designed for that. We want a language that is simple and that many people know how to read and write, with programming tools and help widely available. PoliticalSim does a great deal with simple spreadsheets and the Excel macros which use spreadsheet formulas.

The download file includes a user's manual with voting-rule definitions. It is about 1500K zipped, 3100K uncompressed.

Programmers can add features (and fix bugs) because this is "open source" software. Startup support is available by email. If your version of Excel gives an error message, simply click "continue", and please tell us. The graphics in PoliticalSim's Map_Reps page can push Excel to the breaking point. The last maintenance update was on 2001-06-16.

Thanks to all those whose feedback has improved Political

Sim.

Yes Sim Candidate 1 Yes Sim Candidate 2 Yes

Question

. . .

No Sim Candidate 3 No Sim Candidate 4 No

Question

Try PoliticalSim tm (political sim) a free open-source political-simulation game for Windows, and SimElection tm, electoral simulation software for Macintosh, for interactive simulations of approval voting, Borda rule, Condorcet rules (minmax & Copeland), instant runoff voting (IRV, alternative vote, Hare), majority rule, plurality rule, proportional representation (list PR with largest remainders or divisors), single transferable vote (STV with Droop, Hare or simple quota), choice voting, cumulative vote, limited vote, bloc vote and other voting rules. It demonstrates comparative politics and game theory including multi-winner decision making.

Answer: 8) American author and congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce
heard in detail about the effectiveness of advertising while married to
purveyor Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Fortune magazines.

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