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

[Stephen Bain]

On 7/13/07, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just because I am not familiar with STV.  On a list of say 10
> candidates, can you chose to number the number of candidates that you
> want, or do you have to number all candidates?

Typically yes, one must rank all of the candidates in order of
preference. But it's certainly possible to allow voters to rank as few
or as many candidates as they wish.

The downside is that it can result in wasted votes (eg, if I ranked 5
out of a field of 10, but all the 5 that I ranked were eliminated, my
vote has nowhere to go and is exhausted), but it's much more
convenient.

Here in Australia we use STV for elections to the Australian Senate,
and we deal with the problem of having to rank very large numbers of
candidates by using group tickets, the idea being that a voter votes
for a ticket, and is taken to have ranked the candidates in the order
that the ticket has set out beforehand. That's probably far too
complicated for our purposes though.

There's an example of how STV works at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#An_example

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com