On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 04:09:09PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote: > > > Or: the addition of 22 people voting against A caused A to win. In my > > > opinion, this is very wrong. > > On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 09:38:46PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > > Why ? > > I answered this in the message you were responding to, immediately > following the paragraph you quoted.
Yes, but you don't answered the question of why it should be handled such. I have the impression that you are trying hard for a way to handle quorums and that this cause many ciritics and problems, while the current quorums on debian votes is very very small and not probable to cause problems. Also, this has been a long discution, and i want to submit to you an idea, that i would have done myself if i have time, but which would make me (and maybe other peoples) more confident in the solution proposed. You have a set of rules which you want to follow in order for the election method to be good. You have right now, no proof that this is even possible, nor that the thing you propose fullfils these principles without a doubt. English is not the most natural of languages for this kind of things. Would it not be possible to translate these rules into either mathematical notations or better yet logical predicates, and then use a theorem proover like coq for example to prove that such a method does exist. Since coq is a constructive theorem prover, by proving that it is possible to find such a method, you will get the method by the same way, and can automatically generate an ocaml program which fullfills this method. If you were to do that, there would be no doubt that the method does what you want, what do you think ? That said, you would still need to be sure of your goals, which seem confuse. Maybe we should held a vote on what criterion our voting system should have ? > > You are trying to use the quorum for something it is not for. > > I disagree. Well, at least you are using quorum in a counter-intuitive way. > > A quorum (in traditional elections) is just a mean of ensuring that > > enough people are present so that the election is meaningfull. > > And that's what I'm using quorum for. > > Except my proposal for quorum satisfys the monotonicity criterion > (http://www.electionmethods.org/evaluation.html#MC) while the mechanism > you're proposing would have cases where an option wins *because* of > votes against it. Well, you cannot say that. If the quorum is met, then the option wins. It is because you voted, sure, but if you had not voted, then the election is not valid, and you cannot say that you you did loose. > > Also, there is no way you are going to be able to explicitly exploit > > this weakness you pointed out, unless you are the project voting > > secretary (or whatever it is called) or you did manage to get access to > > the already voted ballot. > > I'm concerned about the effects of lack-of-interest. I don't want people > deciding to not submit a ballot because of the chance that they'll cause > something they're opposed to to win. If this happens even once it will > be very upsetting. So what ? If a ballot is submited and the quorum is not meet, then nobody is interested. Anyway, if the result of a vote is so low as to barely meet the (low) quorum we now have, then it is difficult to set the representativeness of said vote. Alternatively, you could say that if the quorum is meet exactly, then the winning vote has to win by at least two votes, and you get the monotonicity criterion for free (well in the letter, maybe not in the principle though). > > Let's say you are against option A, and you have two choices : > > > > o not vote, in hope the quorum will not be met. > > > > o vote against A (or DA in this case). > > > > if you do not vote, like you suppose, you can only do this in a > > meaningfull way if you are sure that the quorum will not be met, which > > should not be possible. And if you don't vote and the quorum is met, > > then you have one less vote against A, and if A wins, you deserve it. > > Your argument is valid if quorum is never used. Why ? A, i suppose you mean it is valid if the quorum is met ? Since it is very low, it will be met most of the time. > Imagine that quorum is relevant at some point in time: imagine that we > have a set of elections which default because they don't meet quorum. Given the current low quorum, then i would much prefer that a vote which does not met quorum is further discussed or even abandoned altogether. > At this point: you wouldn't be certain that the some elections will meet > quorum. Neither could you be certain that voting against an amendment > in some elections would not cause that amendment to win. Well, the problem with that is that it really is a chancy things, and suppose you know already a lot about the outcome of the vote to use such a strategy. I suppose only the vote secretary has some such power. Do you really think such a strategy is doable if you don't know before hand how many people will vote, and what their vote will be. Friendly, Sven Luther
