[Foundation-l] Board vote, need a bit of help

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> Personally I see an argument that a voluntary organization has much
> less of a need to pick a compromise candidate than a government.  If
> you're picking the capital of Tennessee, fine, you pick something in
> the middle.  But change it to a vote for a Wikimedia board member and
> it might be better to fully satisfy as many people as possible and let
> those with radically different viewpoints fork off their own projects
> than to dilute the core project principles with compromise.  I'm not
> sure if I agree with this or not, though.

I don't think thats an unreasonable argument. Not quite sure if I
share it, have to think about it more. ;)   For one forking doesn't
seem like a good solution for splits on details (details are
important, but don't justify forks...)

> I agree that cloning resistance is very important, though, so
> plurality voting seems out.  Why not IRV?

My preference for this kind of selection is IRV.

In my view IRV's weakness for this sort use is distortion from people
overrating hoping to cause earlier round elimination of their least
liked choice.  (I think this is a worse problem then the underrating
of second choices usually done against cordeset methods in elections
where there are usually a few reasonable choices)

> Well, technically, if your two top candidates are really *identical*,
> there would be no strategic reason to not approve of both.

Sure, but not everyone will see two candidates to be clones.   Some
people see A/B the same, approve both.  Others see A and B as largely
similar but randomly prefer one or the other (perhaps they just want
to have a favorite), dishonestly underrate their less preferred
alternative in the hopes of helping their (slightly) preferred
candidate win.. votes end up split and C wins.

> Back to
> reality, though, it could be that people are voting strategically, or
> it could be that they just don't understand what they're doing.

It's very true.

> If
> the latter, this could happen with the Schulze method as well.  People
> might rank one candidate "1" and leave all the rest blank.  There
> wouldn't be a strategic reason to do this (would there?), but it still
> might happen.

I'd love to see stats on that. My bet is that a many will rank only a
few,  because of lacking patience, or a belief that they are helping
their primary choices win like on an  approval vote. ::shrugs::

One improvement might be to force people to rank all the candidates
(not uniquely rank, just rank).  I'm sure some would give up voting if
they couldn't just put a "1" next to their favorite, but would biasing
the election towards the choices of people who are more patient be all
that bad? ;)

> I'm interested in whether or not we'll even know if this happened.
> How much data are we going to be given about the votes?

In the past information on how many were approved was released.   I
don't see why the complete decrypted ballots (which contain no
personal information) couldn't be released.  Especially since we'll
have ranked data it would be interesting to see how different counting
systems (IRV, approval of  all ranked, approval of all 1s, etc) might
have influenced the results... and it's pretty normal for the
anonymous ballots in an election to be not treated as secret.