Re: Voting experiment

+1

"no other candidate" is a good feature.

On 2014-07-09 13:04, Charles McCathie Nevile wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I have an outstanding action item from the AB to propose a voting 
> experiment that could be considered for running as part of elections 
> (eg. TAG/AB elections).
>
> My strawman proposal:
>
> The purpose of the experiment is to enable W3C Team to gather data on 
> whether a different voting system to our current "Multiple 
> Non-Transferable Vote" system would change the outcome of elections, 
> and in particular, in ways that might make elected groups more broadly 
> representative of the voters.
>
> In elections for the AB and TAG, we provide a ballot that offers two 
> ways to vote.
>
> 1. The current system - you select up to the number of seats 
> available, from the candidates running.
> This would be the binding vote - unless we change the process we can't 
> change that anyway.
>
> 2. You can rank as few or as many candidates, plus the option "no 
> (other) candidate". as you want, in preference order.
>
> 1 indicates your most preferred candidate. Giving two or more 
> candidates an equal rank is a rational statement, and results should 
> be calculated accordingly.
>
> A completed ballot for 3 seats with 6 candidates could be like:
>
> check         Candidate name        Preference
> up to 3                             order
> [ ]            Alice                   [1]
> [X]            Byron                   [2]
> [ ]            Charlie                 [ ]
> [ ]            Daniels                 [3]
> [X]            Elliott                 [4]
> [ ]            Franklin                [ ]
>                No (other) Candidate    [5]
>
> (In a real vote, the order of names should be randomised. Not that we 
> do that now).
>
> A vote for "No (other) candidate" [0] would be considered a vote for a 
> hypothetical alternative instead of a vote being "exhausted" (as 
> happens if all the candidates voted for by a single voter have been 
> determined as elected or not before the completion of counting). A 
> candidate beaten by the hypothetical alternative would not be 
> considered elected.
>
> The results of this ranking can be used to asses the results we would 
> get by using simple "Single Transferable Vote" [1], "Schulze STV" [2]. 
> There are several ways to use votes as indicative of likely results 
> from "Approval Voting" [3], although they are less reliable than the 
> other information we would get from the survey.
>
> In addition we can use the first preference to approximate the results 
> we would get using "single non-transferable voting" [4] (where each 
> voter can only vote for one candidate).
>
> I note that if we used preference ranking for other votes, we would 
> also be able to look at the effect of systems explicitly designed to 
> rank outcomes, such as STV or Schulze STV. However this proposal 
> neither requires nor prohibits doing do.
>
> [0] This is related to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_the_above
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_STV
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
> [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Non-Transferable_Vote
>
> cheers
>
> Chaals
>