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

> On Sep 29, 2017, at 15:40 , Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> * Run the STV tabulation on the preference lists as if there were only one available seat; elect that candidate; mark that candidate as ‘withdrawn’ 
>> * Repeat for the remaining seats: Re-run the STV tabulation on the preference lists as if there were only one available seat; elect that candidate, mark that candidate as ‘withdrawn’ 
>> I am not sure whether anyone anywhere uses STV like this, and I am not aware of any analysis or papers, and absent some sort of analysis, I would be pretty hesitant to adopt it. If you mean something else, please say (notably something in use and analyzed).If you mean something else, please say (notably something in use and analyzed).
> 
> That’s what I meant.  It’s how I assumed STV would work in the W3C context.  It’s more or less how the old system worked:
> 
> - Run the (trivial) tabulation of who got the most votes for the first available seat; elect that candidate;
> - Repeat for the remaining seats: Run the (trivial) tabulation of who got the next most votes, elect that candidate
> 
> except that we would have a complicated STV tablulation based on preference  order rather than simple count of votes. 
> 
> I’m not necessarily advocating this procedure, I’m leaning toward just going back to the simple system we used to have. I’m just pointing out to the AC what I only recently understood: we no longer get to vote for the set of people we think are most qualified for various reasons, we are forced to rank them on some arbitrary scale, and only one vote ends up actually counting.  This is a fundamental change in the election philosophy that never got discussed as far as I can find in the archives. As Florian points out, it’s hard to reason about the implications of changing the voting system, but I don’t want to gloss this over as a simple bug in Process 2017 that can be fixed by removing the “one vote per available seat” language. 
> 

There is an aspect of the current voting mechanism that I forgot to mention: the lack of equal ranking.

We are forced to rank-order the candidates; if there are 3 candidates that are equally acceptable to you, you have to rank-order them, and (modulo the transfer of excess votes from candidates who get elected over the quota), your vote actually can only impact/elect one of them.

We investigated equal-preference voting, and though there are definitions of how this works in STV, none of the tabulation software we could find actually supports it.

(We don’t need to explore the confusing “and no other candidate” option on the current form, as it does not, in fact, have any effect on the outcome).


David Singer
Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Friday, 29 September 2017 23:39:27 UTC