Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

I don't know how this would be handled. In fact we had some discussion on -community about how many votes, voting methods, etc. It's probably fixed for this time though, but is certainly open to changes for the next run. Please throw in your 2p'worth on the list if you know anything about voting theory/practice.

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

Because someone wasn't bright enough to implement something like Approval or Condorcet.

PS: not everyone is allowed to vote.

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorc...ndorcet_voting

On bottom is also software. Debian used Condorcet + SSD for ages.

Heres more uses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze...Schulze_method

But heck, even something like Approval would have made it a lot more democratic already.

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

Depends on your definition, the more complex the voting system the more "interesting" the effects for the not-first-place candidates become (though one-person one-vote is by no means the optimum! :) )

Some sort of discussion will have to be held to arrange what to use for next time, as well as what software to use to run the vote.

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

IMO there isn't much discussion necessary. All the information is already outlined on Wikipedia articles.

Democracy is the system where a number of people (in this case the eligeble people are outlined by Nokia) elect from a list of candidates (in this case selected by a rule as outlined by Nokia); the winners will represent the people who are under their reign (NOT only those who voted for you; seems to be a missconception...). Between these 2 groups of voters and candidates we want the procedure to be as democratic as possible so that the people who choose are the best represented. That is the goal of democracy which current governments are by far not able to reach because of insincere and strategic voting. Democracy is not a 1 or a 0 despite what some might want you to believe.

On the Internet we have the opportunity to implement a better system than Pluratity. Lets make use of this.

If you want to touch on the subject of complexity, by all means, quote me on Condorcet. Its the only reasonable argument against Condorcet I can think of. Approval is not complex at all compared to Plurarity.

Example:
lardman: YES
Karel Jansens: YES
Reggie: YES
allnameswereout: ABSTAIN

Means lardman, Karel Jansens, Reggie get +1 and allnameswereout gets +0. Count 'em all up, highest score wins. I'm pretty sure the entire world is able to say yes or no when asked. With Approval, in the US, the Democrats and Republicans might actually gain some competition during the elections. Competition is good...

Condorcet is much more democratic. Its used by communities such as Debian for long time now. Open source tools to calculate the outcome are available. You can find all kind of examples on Condorcet, preferably with SSD as underlying ruleset to solve the maths. They're using a CLI utility which outputs the mathematics which are then posted on mailing list but IIRC theres even GUIs available.

Heres some Condorcet insights and compares http://rangevoting.org/EMorg/indx.html

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

What, exactly, did Nokia have to do with any of this? :\

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

Instead of such a snarky remark and such a negative smiley you can just say its a community project with a link. I thought it was officially endorsed by Nokia because I thought Qgil gave responsibility out of his hands and because I saw it on maemo.org announcement.

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

I sensed sarcasm and hostility in your post, what can I say.

This has nothing at all to do with Nokia. It was Jaffa's idea and lardman and myself assisted him a bit with the inception. :)

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

In addition, this conversation is over a month old and has always been open. Read maemo-community for more of my grief about this (i.e., where has everyone been until now?).

-T.

Re: Maemo Community Council Elections
 

Now when I looked at the Wikipedia article most relevant, I came up with:Quality of representation, or who gets what degree of representation, are not criteria for that definition, or any other I've seen, for democracy. Indeed, your description explicitly rejects certain types of democracy, e.g. direct democracy.
(Also, if you want the winners to effectively represent the whole rather than the majority, I'd expect you to support Borda or similar; it may be said that Borda is to Condorcet as median is to mean.)
Agreed, though I believe you meant plurality, which isn't even quite what we have. But the definition of 'better' for an electoral system is not inherent in the word democracy, nor is it even well agreed-on.

It's simple enough, to be sure; but while the alleged complexity of other voting systems is an obstacle in changing government elections, I think it's no problem for us.
I don't see that it's much more democratic, or that the differences boil down to "more democratic"; I think what we should be after are fair (which all systems under consideration are), transparent, and safe to game*, and appropriate to the type of election.
Myself, I prefer range voting; but I don't see that any of these is appropriate for a group of at-large seats like this. (Actually, if we had one less candidate, it would be a single-seat elimination! ;)) For my part, though, I haven't done as much reading on the multi-seat election styles; I've a strong revulsion for the party-based systems, but am undecided between cumulative and single-transferable-vote. Still, the single-nontransferable-vote scheme used here isn't that bad, IMHO; it's better than the plurality-at-large system used for local elections in my state. (At this point, it really doesn't matter, because there are no obvious parties, but it's better to avoid that in principle.)

Not impressive; their claims regarding the states' rights argument for the electoral college are weak, they promote government intervention in primaries, and they make no discussion (that I saw) of the strongest other contender, range voting.

You see, there's plenty of room for argument here, and claiming that one solution is the best on such virtues as "most democratic" aren't particularly persuasive; a discussion on this would be better served by discussing concrete advantages and disadvantages.


*By safe, I mean that since we cannot eliminate tactical voting and strategic nomination, AKA gaming the system (Gibbard-Satterthwaite), we should assume it, and not choose a system like IRV which is 'twitchy' to changes, and hard to game effectively. It should be robust so that voters using a reasonably good estimate of candidates' chances will give a nearly 'fair' winner, rather than a grossly distorted one.