[Foundation-l] The average voter and voting systems (was Re: Notice of the results of the WMF Board of Trustees election)

[the wub]

Zeroing in on the bit about me... :-)

On 13/07/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia at att.net> wrote:
> Explanation #2 is a very real possibility. Anecdotally, we definitely
> have people who did not understand this point, either because they
> didn't understand how approval voting works or because they were
> confused by the voting instructions. Even the wub (whose vote I don't
> mean to suggest was actually confused) commented in the aftermath about
> the difficulty of "deciding between the candidates", which is precisely
> the kind of approach to voting this method is supposed to discourage.
> Old habits are hard to break, established thought processes hard to unlearn.
>

I certainly understood the voting, I just could have phrased it
better. Nevertheless I "approved" as in "would be perfectly happy to
see on the Board" a few candidates who I didn't tick a box for. Simply
because I have an order of preference, and approval voting doesn't
give a way to express that. So I did the best I could, as I guess many
other voters did. I would much rather see something like STV used,
which seems to me the optimal system (although there are an awful lot
of articles in [[Category:Voting systems]] to choose from)

-- 
the wub