# Implementing the Schulze-Method with Python

Posted on July 20, 2014 under python

The Schulze Method is a voting systems that has some nice properties setting it apart from other, more widely used voting systems. Wikipedia has a rather short list of users showing that pretty much only the Pirate Parties, Linux Distributions and other development groups, but also some student governments at universities use it.

As part of an assignment for a course we had to implement this method. I will show my implementation below and explain how I did it.

## The Implementation

The Schulze Method defines $d\left[V,W\right]$ to be the number of voters preferring $V$ to candidate $W$. This "function" was implemented using a Python dictionary. The terse syntax Python provides enables us to access the elements literally the same way we do in the mathematical definition.

Let's assume the preference relations are expressed as a list of tuples, specifying the number of voters having this preference relation and a string of candidates (represented by a character) from top to bottom.

Our first step is to calculate the set of candidates. This is easy, as each preference relation is assumed to contain all candidates, so we can just setify one of these (the easiest is the first).

``````candidates = set(preferences[0][1])
``````

`dict.fromkeys` creates a dictionary with the keys given in the parameter, optionally setting the values to the second parameter (we use `0`):

``````d = dict.fromkeys([(a,b) for a in candidates for b in candidates if a != b], 0)
``````

This line reads a lot like the equivalent algebraic notation:$d\left[V,W\right]=0\phantom{\rule{2ex}{0ex}}\forall a\forall b\phantom{\rule{1ex}{0ex}}a\in C,\phantom{\rule{1ex}{0ex}}b\in C,\phantom{\rule{1ex}{0ex}}a\ne b$. The syntactical feature used here is called list comprehensions.

The next step is to count each time candidate `A` was preferred to candidate `B`. A candidate is preferred if it appears before the other in the preference relation string, e.g. if the string is `"ABC"`, `A` is preferred to `B` and to `C`, but also `B` is preferred to `C`. If five voters use the relation mentioned above, $d\left[V,W\right]$ will be increased by 5.

``````    for (weight, relation) in preferences:
localWinnings = [(relation[index], localLoser) for index in range(len(relation) - 1) for localLoser in relation[index+1:]]
for pair in localWinnings:
d[pair] += weight
``````

We can ignore the path $X,Y$ if the reverse path has at least the same width: ```python for pair in d: if d[pair] <= d[swap(pair)]: d[pair] = 0 ```

We now have to iterate over all the possible paths, to find out which is the widest from each start to each end.

``````    for (i, j, k) in [(a,b,c) for a in candidates for b in candidates for c in candidates if a != b and a != c and b != c]:
indirectPathWidth = min(d[i, j], d[j,k])
directPathWidth = d[i,k]
if indirectPathWidth > directPathWidth:
d[i,k] = indirectPathWidth

return candidates - {pair[0] for pair in d if d[pair] < d[swap(pair)]}
``````