Re: Board of directors membership election

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 02:26:57PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Votes will be counted using the "Condorcet" election method system which
> will be used to select the most preferred candidate. Conceptually, the
> election will be broken into a a series of pairwise races between each
> possible paring of the candidates. If one candidate beats each of the
> others in pairwise races, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the
> "Cloneproof/Schwartz Sequential Dropping" method is employed to choose
> the most preferred candidate from those remaining. Some background
> reading on preferential voting and Condorcet is available online at
> http://www.electionmethods.org/ .

Looking over the list of votes last time, I noticed that a number of
people voted in a way that meant their vote was worth little or less
than they probably wanted. The instructions were pretty clear on the
fact that we're using a preferential voting system, that preferences
alone is what matters, and that if you vote for only one candidate and
that's it, your vote means nothing. This is different than the way
that Debian (which also uses Condorcet) handles unranked
choices. Perhaps the instructions weren't as clear as they could have
been.

I'd be happy to further clarify the voting instructions and add a
little bit of *bold face* to minimize the impact of this type of
confusion this time around.

Regards,
Mako

--
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako(at)debian(dot)org
http://mako.yukidoke.org/