Due to the uproar caused by the voting system used in the last election, a new system needs to be selected for next year. To this end, I'm committing a new task for the November Sprint to define the new system.

As I don't much care about voting theory myself, I'm asking those people who do so obviously care to move beyond the loud-complaining stage to the constructive-change stag and outline a better voting system on the wiki.

I'll stipulate 3 things first, though:

• Yes, we know plurality methods suck, get over it and define something that doesn't suck. We're after a concrete voting system, so no proselytizing about your favorite system, or ranting about the evils of plurality methods.
• Keep the theory reasonable, and try to keep the content appropriate for people with no background in voting theory. Yes, we're all very impressed by howe much you know, but none of that needs to be paraded around to define a new system.
• This has nothing to do with voter nor candidate eligibility, this is only about the voting system to be used by eligible voters to elect eligible candidates. We'll deal with that more contentious issue somewhere else.

With that in mind, let's see what sort of awesome system you can come up with!

The deadline is November 30th, 2008.

Thanks!

My opinions as community member: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting

"Preferential voting (or preference voting) is a type of ballot structure used in several electoral systems in which voters rank a list or group of candidates in order of preference."

All the rest is just theory and implementation details you can skip.

In practice, instead of voting one best candidate (like last time) or choosing 5 candidates at the same level (like the GNOME Foundation does), each voter ranks the candidates by preference and maths do the rest.

In practice this option provides better chances to those that are consistently liked by most voters, and less chances to those more controversial being in the top for some and in the very bottom for others.

Example:

a - Zoe is a candidate, a nice person. She is not in people's mind for the top runner and for most is not even in the top 5 but everybody has her at least in the 6th position.

b - Joe is a candidate, a strong character. A minority thinks of having him as primary runner, another minority don't but still would have him as 5th candidate to get in the Council. The majority actually dislike him.

In a preferential system Zoe has more chances of being elected than Joe. In the current system Zoe has no chances and Joe will probably get in.

On a more theoric approach, the preferential system advocates that more "community inteligence" is put into use to determine who are the elected candidates. Another example:

a - Jim is an amazing candidate. Everybody loves her. A huge majority votes for her and she gets 300 votes more than needed to obtain a seat.

b - Tim and Ming are very good forerunners. A lot of people vote for any or both of them. At the end Tim gets the sit, Ming is left out - just for one vote.

How fair is that? The "inteligence" unused in the 300 extra votes from Jim could have been put into better used in a preferential system, deciding with much more ground whether Tim, Ming or both were the most supported for a seat.

Software available to do this? No idea. http://um.com.au/cgi-bin/cassandra/ is linked in the wiki page, and ther are websites offering the service for free (we used one in GNOME to determine the winner of the GUADEC logo contest a few years ago).

Sounds very much like the Eurovision Song Contest. Douze points to qgil for this.

That's it! The candidates all need to record a song!

But I also agree with the preferential system. I'd like to see something like this implemented in "real world" politics, too, especially in areas where there's a lot of choice. Americans have created a workaround for their political system that involves reducing the choice to two, but that's not a good solution.

What, so much time to moan about how much the voting system we picked sucked (I'm recalling pages and pages of text here), but not just a few minutes to step up to fix it now that you're presented with the opportunity?

Pity.

Why belabor it, GA?

Quim wins. Instead of debating further, we can all just Thank his post and move on.

Oh, and if I'm no longer with Nokia I'm running next year. Beware, beyotches!

I'm feeling spiteful.

Well, you could've run this year if you had chosen. Nokia employees, being a part of the Maemo Community, are permitted to run. You just have to disclose your relationship with Nokia.

The only people I might, personally, discourage from running are the maemo.org folks (X-Fade, dneary, andre, karsten, etc) since they're already directly involved in the process and I'd rather bring in some additional faces than piling more hats on a single person.

That said, I'm glad to hear it. The turnout for candidates was ever so slightly underwhelming last time around.

You might as well just anoint me now so we can move on to more trivial things.

Qgil's suggestion is good, as long as one is also allowed to state indifference between 2 candidates. In other words to specify the same preference between one candidate. E.g. Ming 1, Tim 1 (then Jim gets 3).

Well, perhaps the lengthy thread discussing voting systems last time actually persuaded everyone who cared to the same side...

Anyway, I'm not sure yet; I have been sticking my head back into Wikipedia and other resources, plus just plain thinking. I'm a range voting fan for single-winner contests, but it's not clear to me that the likely outcome of range voting extended to a multi-winner contest is optimal. It will tend to pick centrists a group of similar winners, while it could be argued that we should always have, say, at least one my-N810-is-a-laptop-you-insensitive-clod geek and one what's-this-"root"-thing-anyway mainstream type on the Council; I'm not sure I buy into that notion here, but I'm not sure I don't either.

As that distinguishes between very different types of voting systems (proportional vs. non-proportional), it seems that would be an important discussion to have, so let's have that first instead of (or in addition to) implementation details!

Question for discussion:

Should the goal be:

• Choose several similar candidates that will make all factions somewhat happy and none too angry.
  Effect with enough randomly-distributed candidates tends to all winners identical in all significant issues.
• Choose some candidates to please each faction, proportional to the voters in that faction?
  Effect with enough randomly-distributed candidates tends to a spread of dissimilar winners corresponding roughly to clumps of voter position.