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

>  To be clear, removing this sentence, to make the process document clear and not misleading, is a bug fix.

To be pedantic, I consider the way we fail to implement Process 2017 as written to be the bug :-) .  If there was any discussion of how STV implicitly means that there is only one vote counted no matter how many available seats there are, I don't remember it and can’t find it in the ac-forum archives.  I regularly kick myself for not thinking through how STV works with one vote per available seat (or not) and getting clear answers before voting for Process 2017. 

I could more easily live with treating this as a bug fix if we had a better answer to the question in your previous message of how to give some candidates equal ranking.  Maybe I’m an outlier on the AC, but I just don’t think in terms of ranking candidates, I think about the set of people with the combination of qualities needed for the TAG or AB, and whether they would work well together.  If I can give equal rank to the set of people I’d like to see elected, and others can rank them by some attribute they want to see represented, then maybe we can have an election system that works for both.  If that just doesn’t work with STV, we have a harder choice to make, and I for one would prefer the old system to one that forces a ranking without giving one vote per available seat.



> On Sep 29, 2017, at 4:40 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
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> 
> 
>> On Sep 29, 2017, at 15:40 , Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@gmail.com> wrote:
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>> 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. 
>> 
> 
> To be clear, removing this sentence, to make the process document clear and not misleading, is a bug fix.
> 
> Whether we like STV voting in general, and its implications, is the discussion we’re having; triggered by the bug fix, perhaps, but a much wider discussion.
> 
> David Singer
> Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.
> 
>

Received on Saturday, 30 September 2017 17:48:54 UTC