Re: Board of directors membership election

On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 09:04:24AM +1100, Craig Small wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 01:44:02PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> > We're using condorcet voting, which does not have a concept of equal
> > ranking except in the no preference sense.
>
> Do you mean no preference at all?

Right. Condorcet works by comparing preferences in bitwise pairs. In a
"pure" Condorcet implementation (AIUI), if you don't list a candidate,
you simply won't be expressing a preference between that candidate and
any others. If you list only one candidate, you haven't expressed
preference at all. If you leave one person off, you simply haven't
affected any of the sub-races between that candidate and any others.

> > People should really just read the instructions, and the voting
> > system should probably print a fat warning saying 'your vote has
> > no meaning' if people select a single option.
>
> A warning at least would be useful.

There was a very clear warning last time. I agree that we should at
least *bold* a line of it or something because evidently, some people
didn't read it.

> What does Debian use for it's GR? It appears to allow incomplete
> ballots.

I'm not an expert on the Debian system but I believe that Debian uses
a modified version of Condorcet that allows for things like quorum,
super majorities, default options and a couple little tweaks to make
sure it works in some corner cases (I believe).

> So SPI uses one sort of voting, which must not have blank options, and
> Debian uses another sort of voting, which does.

The two systems are already very similar.

According to the by-laws, it's up to Wichert. It seems that ordering
all unranked pairs as equally ranked (same as no preference really)
but lower than the last ranked choice makes sense. Personally, I don't
care too much as long as it's documented well, which was my only point
in bringing up this issue in the first place.

There's only so far we should go for people who can't be bothered to
read a half-paragraph of instructions on the page that they enter
their vote. :)

Regards,
Mako

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