Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Proposal for election process

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5: Re: Proposal for election process (response to 1)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 10/02/03 05:17 PM

Joel, in the case of using IRV for multi-winner elections, you just stop eliminating when you get to the number of winners you want.

Anyway IRV seems way too complicated. My points are these:

  • Staggered elections = dilution of minority votes, this is the same thing, but not quite as bad as voting via precinct instead of voting at large. There is also no justification for this. Why vote every six months?
  • One person One vote also isn't completely fair. If forces you to vote for people you don't want to, or wastes at least part of your vote. For a nine seat race, each person gets nine votes, why can't they just vote for one person (they get nine) or two (each gets 4.5) etc.? (That is one way) The other way is to count each vote: 5 for her 4 for him. This allows, again minority voice, otherwise I can only vote for my candidate once for 9 seats, and my chances of helping him/her and getting a voice are diluted to 1/9.

I think if we are going to all this process, with all these rules, why not choose some more modern method, one more likely to get a variety of voices?

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6: Re: Proposal for election process (response to 5)
Posted by Joel Aufrecht on 10/02/03 06:29 PM
The upside to staggered votes is that some membership of the OCT team is guaranteed to remain constant over any period less than a year. Do you think that dilution of minority votes is likely to be a serious problem? If so, how could we address it without losing continuity? Three staggers of 3 people each, and elections every 4 months?

Fair, as I've seen it best defined, is "the choice that the most people want, wins," which in a situation with more than two choices means, "the choice that wins more than other choices in pairwise comparison, wins." And the mathematicans report that Condorcet is the best way to determine this for many-choice, single-winner. But I haven't seen any research on how that applies to many-choice, many-winner. Can you point me to some, or better yet, summarize? If we stack votes (5 votes for a top choice, 4 for a second choice), my intuition is that we are then open to more gaming, and potentially less fairness by the above definition. And we wouldn't be able to produce a count that says, 55 people out of 180 wanted X as a team member.