On Jan 15, 2008, at 7:40 AM, Kevin Venzke wrote: > The rule that a majority of voters must vote is unfortunate because it > means that by showing up to vote "No" you can cause the proposal to > succeed. > > But in my opinion, to avoid government abuse of referendum, they > should not > pass or fail only on the opinions of the voters that the government > was > able to convince to participate. > > If I choose to not vote in a referendum for some issue, I want this > to be > interpreted as "have the government make this decision" not "let the > other > voters make this decision."
Reasonable people might differ on this question, but at the very least it's ambiguous (though implicit in the rules). This is a kind of quorum rule, really. The Green Party of California had a similar problem with their General Assembly rules for treating abstentions. The old rule: 7. Abstentions are not counted in calculating the percentage vote; however if 20% or more of those voting abstain, the proposal fails. This rule is rather extreme, as you can imagine, giving a rather small minority veto power by abstaining, where they couldn't defeat a proposal by voting no, and in fact somebody noticed that and used it that way. I proposed new language, which was adopted by consensus: 7. Abstentions are not counted in calculating the percentage vote. The minimum number of affirmative votes required to pass a proposal shall be the voting threshold times the decision-making quorum. The language is a little abstract because the "voting threshold" is variously a simple majority, 2/3 or 80%, depending on the question. "Decision-making quorum" distinguishes this quorum from a different quorum that's required to open a meeting, not relevant to this discussion. The result is monotonic, while assuring that a proposal can't pass without a baseline amount of voters willing to affirmatively approve it. My rationale for this particular arithmetic is that it's the number of votes required to pass a proposal when only a quorum is present and nobody abstains. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
