[Foundation-l] Voting

[Mark Ryan]

2008/6/2 Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com>:
> As an aside (disclosure: I too am a candidate), there is terrible
> explanation of the voting procedure on the voting page. It just says
> "use the schulze method" and links to the Wikipedia article on the
> topic, which is incomprehensibly technical, and describes all sorts of
> code features and matrices and stuff, and never once really explains
> what kind of voting system it is. I realize that's more of a criticism
> of the Wikipedia article than of the voting system, but the voting
> page doesn't really explain the operation of the system. I think it
> ought to do so.

This is my fault. It was pointed out to me yesterday or the day before
that the main English election information page on Meta still said
"the election system is yet to be confirmed" or something like that,
which was clearly an oversight. So I whacked in some scant information
quickly while I had a bit of time.

If you'd like a bit of a better explanation here, here it is:

Voters rank some or all of the candidates according to their
preference, where a lower number is considered more preferred to a
higher number. Then, at the end of the election, a script is run which
goes through all of the votes. The script, which uses the so-called
"Schulze Method", looks at a single ballot at a time, and it compares
each candidate with each other candidate. Whichever of those two
candidates is ranked higher by that voter "wins" that pairwise
comparison, and that victory is added to a table comparing each
candidate to each other candidate. This is repeated for every
combination of voters on the ballot, and then repeated for each
ballot.

In the end a table is spat out showing the percentage of ballots on
which each candidate "won" over each other candidate, and the
candidate who wins the most of these candidate-versus-candidate
comparisons wins the election. There's also a further inbuilt method
of resolving ties, which I can't remember off the top of my head.

So that's how the votes are counted. As you can see, it's quite
technical and would be difficult to present in language which would be
easy to translate to all the different languages. This is why our
election information focused more on telling people how to rank their
preferences, rather than how their preferences would later be
analysed.

~Mark Ryan
(Election committee member)