Generating random ranked choice voting (RCV) election data

The program can take the following commandline arguments.

• --num-voters: the number of voters in the election (default: 10)
• --num-candidates: the number of candidates in the election (default: 3)
• --max-unique-rankings: the maximum number of unique rankings to generate (default: num_voters)
• --max-ranking-length: the maximum length of a ranking (default: num-candidates)
• --min-ranking-length: the minimum length of a ranking (default: num-candidates)
• --num-elections: the number of elections to generate (default: 1)
• --output-file: the file to write the election. (If not specified, the election will be written to stdout.)

Output Format

If an output-file is specified, the output file will be a JSON file with the following format:

{
    "num_voters": 10,
    "num_candidates": 3,
    "max_unique_rankings": 4,
    "max_ranking_length": 3,
    "min_ranking_length": 3,
    "num_elections": 1,
    "elections" : [
        {
            "ballots": [
                {
                    "ranking": [1, 2, 0],
                    "count": 4
                },
                {
                    "ranking": [2, 1, 0],
                    "count": 3
                },
                {
                    "ranking": [0, 1, 2],
                    "count": 1
                },
                {
                    "ranking": [1, 0, 2],
                    "count": 2
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

The ballots array contains the ballots in the election. Each ballot has a ranking array, which contains the ranking of the candidates. The count field indicates how many ballots have that ranking.