Comment/Wish 6: Communicating aggregated cast votes in Contests where multiple Candidates are rated

[David-Rosenberg@earthlink.net]

Comment/Wish 6: Provide a straightforward way to communicate partially
aggregated cast votes in Contests where multiple Candidates are rated
or assigned points on a single voter's 440-castvote in a single
Contest

[NOTE: The kind of aggregation for ratings and assignment of points
(proposed in this comment) is different from the kind of aggregation
for rankings (proposed in an earlier comment).]

There are Contests where the "Value" attribute (or perhaps the Rating
attribute that I proposed in an earlier comment) is used to rate or
assign points to multiple Candidates in a single Contest on a single
voter's 440-castvote. I envision these 440s being partially aggregated
at one jurisdictional level and those partially aggregated ballots
being communicated up to the next higher jurisdictional level - where
the election might be counted or where the partially aggregated
ballots from multiple lower jurisdictional levels might be further
aggregated and communicated up to a still higher jurisdictional level.

For example, in a race in which five Candidates can each be rated in
the range 00 - 99 (or not rated), the important information is: for
each Candidate, how many voters rated that Candidate and the
arithmetic sum of the ratings given to that Candidate by all the
voters who chose to rate that Candidate. In a jurisdiction with 10,000
voters, all 10,000 individual ballots could be communicating. However,
it would be more efficient to only communicate the sum of the ratings
given to each Candidate and the number of voters who chose to rate
each Candidate. That is, instead of communicating 10,000 individual
ballots, we would communicate 5 aggregated Selections. I would like a
straightforward way to communicate partially aggregated cast ballots
for these voting methods.

There are probably several ways that this could be supported in EML.
The 510-count is described as "The count message defined by this
schema is used to communicate the results of one or more contests that
make up one or more elections within an election event. It may also be
used to communicate the count of a single reporting unit for
amalgamation into a complete count." It sounds as though the 510-count
may already support it without any further extension. I'll describe
what I see as a possible way to use the 510 for this purpose. Please
let me know whether that appears to be a valid use of the the 510.

Using a 510-count would it be valid to to use the Selection element
(within a VoteGroup) to describe a Candidate, have the ValidVotes
element indicate the number of voters who rated or assigned points to
this Candidate, and have the Value attribute (or the Rating attribute,
if one is introduced as suggested in my earlier comments) give the
arithmetic sum of the ratings or points assigned to that Candidate by
all the "ValidVotes" voters? If it is not, please consider some
extension to permit this use.