Hi folks,

How might one algorithmically go about generating a 2D placement of affinity groups when one only has ranking information? I've been considering writing something that does this for quite some time, ever since I manually generated this chart of the 2009 mayoral election in Burlington:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/File:Burlington2009election-infosheet.png

More recently, a discussion broke out on the Center for Election Science's Discord server on this topic. In particular, we started discussing what it would take to generate Yee diagrams from election results. There weren't answers there; there were just more questions.

I have some ideas for how to do it (by a vaguely Monte-Carlo-ish evaluation, iterating over placement of candidates and voter affinity groups), but I haven't yet figured out a reasonably simple algorithm. I'm going to set this task aside for now, but if others have ideas, I'd love to see them.

Rob