Pairwise counting: Difference between revisions

[[File:Pairwise counting procedure.png|thumb|The procedure for pairwise counting with various ballot formats and examples.]]One potentially useful trick is to, for each voter who has only one 1st choice, report who their 1st choice is, and then skip the pairwise counting for all matchups involving that candidate. So for example, if 3 voters vote A>B>C, then only the fact that there are 3 1st choices for A and 3 voters who prefer B>C need be recorded; this is because a voter prefers their 1st choice to all others, so it can be inferred that 3 unique 1st choices for A means 3 votes for both A>B and A>C. This can be used to save a lot of time for vote-counting in elections where most voters only report a few of their top preferences.

If using pairwise counting for a [[rated method]], one helpful trick is to put the rated information for each candidate in the cell where each candidate is compared to themselves. For example, if A has 50 points (based on a [[Score voting]] ballot), B has 35 points, and C has 20, then this can be represented as: