Re: "Removed statement there is one vote per available seat" - was Re: W3C Process 2018

> On Sep 29, 2017, at 7:34, Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Since only the Team has access to the raw vote data, this discrepancy wasn’t noticed until recently.

Good catch. I certainly wasn't aware of the discrepancy.

> Does it matter?  Definitely, the results can be different.   There is a GitHub discussion of this issue in which I go through a hypothetical example  https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/60#issuecomment-323474691 <https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/60#issuecomment-323474691> to illustrate how the different approaches work.  The  currently implemented STV system would make it easier to elect TAG and AB members ranked #1 by a substantial minority of the AC, the one-vote-per-available-seat STV system would tend to elect people broadly ranked in the top few spots.

Reasoning about voting systems is hard. 

One thing I wonder is which one is more supportive of diverse candidates. Diverse candidates may be people most voters don't know except for a small number of fans, but they could also be people who don't quite have the name recognition of the superstars, but still have a large number of voters who are familiar and confortable with them even if they don't get first spot on many people's list.

I guess it might depend on whether "increase diversity" means "elect candidates from all sorts of places, not just Goozillapplosoft" or means "elect candidates with a broad range of viewpoints, including radical and polarizing ones". It's not obvious too me how much overlap there is between the two understandings, and what the exact effects of the two voting methods are, especially once you take strategic voting into account.

It would be interesting to see if the results on the live data of the past elections for which we have data, even though this isn't perfect, as voting strategies for either system could be different.

—Florian

Received on Friday, 29 September 2017 00:02:41 UTC