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

[Alison Wheeler]

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.

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