habj wrote:

2006/9/19, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:

...

They didn't. The last election was an open and publicly visible vote, and possibly the most acrimonious possible method of running it.

English Wikipedia has used a more or less modified version of the BoardVote software at least once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_July_...

and as it looks to me actually twice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_Decem...

Maybe someone who knows the whereabouts of elections to enwikis arb com can tell us the story of how enwiki, as it seems, decided to have secret ballots in elections to arb com, used it a couple of times and then abandoned it?

What are the conclusions after the last round of elections at enwiki, regarding the method?

The use of the Boardvote software was dropped for the last election because a significant concern about the Arbitration Committee was the lack of majority support from voters. That is to say, since voters could vote for as many or as few candidates as they wished, only one candidate received more than 50% of the vote. In order to fill seven open seats, you had to go down to candidates who received only 31% of the vote. The publicly conducted vote more closely resembled requests for adminship and ensured that quite a large number of candidates received majority support, because those who did not explicitly vote on a candidate were not counted in that person's totals.

Regarding the acrimony involved, David's characterization is not unreasonable, although I would point out that the previous election was also acrimonious. However, that manifested itself during the campaign via endorsements and "disendorsements", instead of directly during the voting process.

I still think the secret ballot has considerable merit to it. However, I also appreciate the importance of the winning candidates enjoying majority support. This can be accomplished without completely overhauling how we conduct elections.

Personally, I would support changing the interface to allow for people to vote Yes or No on each individual candidate, and to only count their ballot as to that candidate if they choose one of these. In other words, in the current board election, I'd have the ability to vote for AaronSw, against Alex756, and not vote at all regarding Arno Lagrange (example unrelated to how I actually voted). Candidates would be chosen on the basis of percentages rather than raw vote totals. A minimum vote total might be set to prevent surprise victories by obscure candidates, although I suspect that enough people would vote against unknowns that this isn't really necessary.

--Michael Snow