Test the sensitivity of a result to tactical voting.

Ballots are added until a specified number of simulated elections (arep) have been held. If a favoured candidate is specified, then the ballot-box is stuffed with ballots awarding first-preference to this candidate. Alternatively, a tacticalBallot may be specified. If both favoured and tacticalBallot are NULL, then a random candidate is selected as the favoured one.

Usage

testAdditions(
  votes,
  ainc = 1,
  arep = NULL,
  favoured = NULL,
  tacticalBallot = NULL,
  rankMethod = "safeRank",
  countMethod = "stv",
  countArgs = list(),
  exptName = NULL,
  equiet = FALSE,
  everbose = FALSE
)

Arguments

votes: A set of ballots, as in vote_2.3.2
ainc: Number of ballots to be added in each step
arep: Maximum number of ballot-stuffed elections to run
favoured: Name of the candidate being "plumped". If NULL, a random candidate is selected from among the candidates not initially top-ranked. All other candidates are fully-ranked at random, with an identical ballot paper being stuffed multiple times. An integer value for favoured is interpreted as an index into the candidate names.
tacticalBallot: A ballot paper i.e. a vector of length ncol(ballots). If this argument is non-NULL, it takes precedence over favoured when the ballot box is being stuffed.
rankMethod: "safeRank" (default), "elected", or "rank". "rank" is a total ranking of the candidates, with ties broken at random. "elected" assigns rank=1 to elected candidates, rank=2 for eliminated candidates.
countMethod: countMethod "stv" (default) or "condorcet"
countArgs: List of args to be passed to countMethod (in addition to votes)
exptName: stem-name of experimental units e.g. "E". If NULL, then a 3-character string of capital letters is chosen at random.
equiet: TRUE to suppress all experimental output
everbose: TRUE to produce diagnostic output from the experiment

Value

A matrix of experimental results, of dimension \(n\) by \(2m+1\), where \(n\) is the number of elections and \(m\) is the number of candidates. The first column is named "nBallots". Other columns indicate the ranking of the eponymous candidate, and their margin over the next-lower-ranked candidate.

Examples

data(food_election) 
testAdditions(food_election, arep = 2, favoured = "Strawberries", 
  countArgs = list(safety = 0))
#> 
#> Adding up to 2 stv ballots = ( 2 3 4 1 5 )
#> Testing progress:  1, 2
#> 
#> Results of testAdditions at 2023-01-18 01:51:21
#> 
#> Dataset = food_election, countMethod = stv, rankMethod = safeRank
#> 
#> |          | safety|
#> |:---------|------:|
#> |countArgs |      0|
#> 
#> 
#> |             | ainc| arep|                                                         tacticalBallot|
#> |:------------|----:|----:|----------------------------------------------------------------------:|
#> |otherFactors |    1|    2| c(Oranges = 2, Pears = 3, Chocolate = 4, Strawberries = 1, Sweets = 5)|
#> 
#> Experiment ID, number of ballots in simulated election, ranks, winning margins:
#> 
#> |exptID | nBallots| Oranges| Pears| Chocolate| Strawberries| Sweets| m.Oranges| m.Pears| m.Chocolate| m.Strawberries| m.Sweets|
#> |:------|--------:|-------:|-----:|---------:|------------:|------:|---------:|-------:|-----------:|--------------:|--------:|
#> |BKF0   |       20|       2|     5|         1|            3|      4| 1.4451111|       0|           8|      1.7774444| 2.777444|
#> |BKF1   |       21|       2|     5|         1|            3|      4| 0.6673333|       0|           8|      2.6663333| 2.666333|
#> |BKF2   |       22|       3|     5|         1|            2|      4| 3.4447778|       0|           8|      0.1104444| 2.555222|