On Wed, Dec 17 2008, Steve Langasek wrote: BTW, thanks for not flaming here; it was pleasantly surprising to see civil discussion on this topic.
> Where there's ambiguity about whether a proposer intended an amendment vs. a > stand-alone proposal, I think it's perfectly reasonable to allow the > secretary latitude in determining intent so as to not get bogged down in > proceduralism. I don't think that was the case here for > <20081114201224.ga11...@intrepid.palfrader.org> - though I'm having a hard > time coming up with references at the moment, I believe there were > objections from some of the seconders of this proposal that it was meant to > be a stand-alone proposal rather than an amendment. > > When I wrote my earlier message, I believed this was much more clear-cut; on > review, I see that the original proposer left the question rather open by > referring to his GR as a "GR (option)". So there are still two > possibilities here: > > - enough of the 17 seconders expressed no opinion on the question of > whether this shoud be a separate GR, as would allow interpreting > their intent in favor of treating it as an amendment and putting it > on a ballot with the original proposal > - more than 12 of the formal seconders objected to placing this > proposal on the same ballot with the original due to the orthogonal > issues, in which case it's not constitutionally valid to override > their stated intent by treating it as an amendment. > > So chances are, there's enough ambiguity here that it's constitutionally > valid to put it on the same ballot as a "related amendment". > > There's a separate issue here, however; namely, that the secretary is the > *only* line of defense against gaming of the GR process by a small group of > developers who propose an uncontroversial but orthogonal amendment that will > always win over the alternatives, in the process preventing the will of the > project from being formally enacted: > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2003/10/msg00168.html > http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2003/11/msg00052.html > http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2003/11/msg00095.html > http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2003/11/msg00101.html > http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2003/11/msg00105.html > > It's not unconstitutional for the secretary to keep orthogonal > amendments on the same ballot, and it is the secretary's prerogative > to keep amendments grouped on a single ballot if he believes they are > related. But when there are multiple orthogonal issues being > considered on a single ballot, choosing to not split those ballots > means disenfranchising the proposers of the > less-popular-but-popular-enough-to-pass option. Given that developers > already have the power to propose as many serial GRs as needed in > order to reconcile incompatibilities between ratified resolutions, the > disenfranchisement is a much worse exploit of our voting system than > anything that could be achieved by forcing partially-orthogonal > options onto separate ballots. OK. I'll buy this line of reasoning. I do agree that beig able to split off unrelated options from the ballot is more useful than keeping related options together. I have been going over my notes and doing some research, but every option I came up with for tactical voting seems only valid for one-shot elections; where people could not propose the same vote over and over. This is not the case here. So it boils down to this: are the issue orthogonal, or are they just different solutions to the same issue? I have presented my argument for why I think they are the same; can you explain why those arguments do not hold, and these are not just different solutions to the same issue? manoj -- The documentation is in Japanese. Good luck. Rich $alz Manoj Srivastava <sriva...@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/> 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org