Voting with Rubber Bands, Weights, and Strings

Instructions:

Here, three voters pull the red point toward r>p>q, and five toward q>r>p. Where do you think the red point will end up? (Who will win the election?)

Click the red dot to release it and start the simulation. The green wedge(s) indicate the winning ranking(s).

▷ Explanation:

With the Mean button enabled, each vote is connected to the red dot by an “ideal rubber band”; tension is proportional to the band’s length. One of the blue lines here represents 3 such bands, and the other represents 5.

Switching to Mediancentre, each vote exerts a unit force on the red dot, which doesn’t vary with the length of the blue line. Such forces would be exerted by strings and weights (as explained in the article).

Model:

Mean

Mediancentre

Color Scheme:

Home

Examples:

Figures:

This document is the interactive portion of the paper "Voting with rubber bands, weights, and strings", by Davide Cervone, Ronghua Dai, Daniel Gnoutcheff, Grant Lanterman, Andrew Mackenzie, Ari Morse, Nikhil Srivastava, and William Zwicker, Mathematical Social Sciences 64 (2012) 11–27.