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

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On 7/14/07, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
>
> Re:
> On Fri, July 13, 2007 08:27, Peter Halasz wrote:
> > I agree. STV is the best system.
> and
> >> On 7/13/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > While I think the Single Transferable Vote is the best voting system,
>
> STV (in all its various actual forms*) is great at producing a 'best
> supported' result where it seeks to select a single winner from the range
> of candidates, however it is quite poor at selecting multiple winners from
> the same range. This is - primarily - because the transfers take no
> account of removed candidates such that someone who receives few first
> preferences might get removed and reallocated early on in the count yet
> over all the voters they actually have good support where the 'winner' had
> solely a sufficient number of first preferences but no wider base of
> support.


This is inaccurate. The way to get past this is to first find out who is
first.
Then eliminate her votes entirely from the count, and redistribute them,
iterating the same process as before, but her removed from the figuration
entirely. Then who comes first in this iteration is considered to have won
second place. Then he in turn is removed from the process, redistributing
his votes etc. etc.


There are programs to do the counting / ordering, btw. You can see an
> example of an STV count at
> http://www.cix.co.uk/~rosenstiel/ldelections/03fex.htm
>
>
> Alison Wheeler
>
>
> * I used to be a member of the Electoral Reform Society here in the UK and
> there were plenty of arguments about which form of STV is the 'right' one
> ;-P


I can only claim to be a spectator of the Hugo Awards voting system, which
not only produces a winner, but provides an ordering of the succeeding
places that often does not follow the order of elimination...



--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]