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Enter the Name for the scenario. It would be best to use a somewhat descriptive name including the target elections event and scenario type or perhaps a scenario count (e.g., ‘Super Tuesday 2020 - 1').
Enter some Notes (optional) to describe the purpose of the scenario if so desired.
Select an event in the Select Event drop-down which contains a list of election events available. Once selected, the Max Contest Wins value will change to reflect the total number of positions available in the event contests.
Set the number of Steps to simulate for the scenario.
Set the Default Step Duration. This duration is useful if you want to use the auto next step feature in a simulation run. This value can be changed from the Run Rehearsal module itself.
Set the number of desired wins for the Close Contest Wins and also the number of Landslide Contest Wins. The sum of ‘Close’ and ‘Landslide’ wins cannot exceed the Max Contest Wins value.
‘Close’ wins are where the vote percentage difference between the leading choice and the choice with the 2nd highest vote count will be less than or equal to 5%.
For ‘Landslide’ wins, the vote percentage difference of the top 2 choices will be greater than or equal to 50%.
Set the Default Max Polls value (per contest). By default, this value will be 100. This value will only be used when setting up for contests that don’t have assigned total polls values yet (i.e., still at 0).
Set the Default Max Votes value (per contest). By default, this value will be 10,000. This value will only be used when setting up for contests that haven’t have the eligible votes value assigned yet. (i.e., null or 0).
If the election event selected uses Parties, a set of controls will appear on the right side of the panel which will allow the setting of the number of contests to be won based on party preferences.
Select the desired option in the Summary Contest Options drop-down control.
Note that Summary Contests are like a normal contests but are marked with a flag in the database indicating that they are used to show the party lead counts. Currently, this database flag can only be set directly in the database contest entry itself and not from FlowChameleon. If you wish to use this feature, please contact Bannister Lake support.
There are 3 different options to choose from:
Ignore - Summary Contests will be ignored and not added to the list of contests used in the Scenario.
Regular - Summary Contests will be treated like regular contests in the Scenario.
Party Leads - Summary Contests will be used to track party lead counts.
This setting doesn't matter if there are no Summary Contests defined for the elections event.
Check the Use Party Scenarios option if the use of Party based contest wins is desired. This will enable the rest of the options following the checkbox control.
The Party Contest Wins grid shows the parties (shortname or code) with the number of maximum contest wins possible for the event. The maximum win value is based on the number of contests that have at least 1 choice of the particular party. The order of the parties in the grid is based on the pre-assigned Zero Vote Order value as defined in the Parties tab of the Elections Customize module. See the topic on Party in the Elections document.
Set the desired number of wins for any of the parties by clicking on the Edit icon
on the left side of the row.A textbox control will appear on the Wins cell of the row.
Fill in the desired number of wins and click on the check icon
to accept the change.
Use the Fill Party Contest Wins controls if auto-filling of wins is wanted. There are 4 types of auto-fill options available: Reset to 0, Set to 1, Equal and Party Order. Once an option is selected, click on the Set Party Wins button to auto-fill the wins.
The Reset to 0 option sets all the win values to 0.
The Set to 1 option sets all the win values to 1.
The Equal option sets all win values to the the max wins value divided by the number of contests.
The Party Order option sets the values using an arithmetic series whose sum is as close as possible to the max contests wins value (with being larger than it). The first party (#1) gets the highest value in the arithmetic series as its win count while subsequent parties get the next lower values of the series.
Note that if the assigned wins value for a row exceeds the Max Wins value for the row, the Max Wins value will be assigned instead.
Click on the Save button
to save the rehearsal scenario options. This will also create the set of rehearsal contests which will appear in the Rehearsal Contests grid.Note that the actual number of party based wins may not be achievable since higher ordered party wins are selected first and the contests left may not have any choices that belong to the particular party. In this case, you will see a message indicating which party wins cannot be fulfilled.
The label for ‘contests’ may change if the area type has a different label as set up in Flow Chameleon for the Elections Event Type in the Customize module. In this example, the area label for the event is ‘Riding’. See the topic on Event Types in the Elections document.
The grid will now show the rehearsal contests and their assigned options. If Party Wins and Close/Landslide Wins values were set, the contests will be randomly chosen to favour a particular party and also a win type of either Close, Landslide or Regular.
In this particular elections event, the contests have their max polls value assigned instead of the rehearsal scenario’s Default Max Polls value (100). On the other hand, the number of eligible votes was not assigned or available at the time when this example was created. As such, the rehearsal scenario’s Default Max Votes value (10,000) is used.
This event also happens to use a Summary Contest which will appear at the start of the list of contests and have their contest name marked with a starting *. Although the Party Win Type indicates ‘Regular’ for this contest, it will be ignored since in this scenario, summary contests are used to track the party leads during a simulation run.
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