On Sat, 2008-02-16 at 10:53 -0500, Luis Villa wrote: > [Speaking purely as a Foundation member and not as a member of the > Board; I've not discussed this with the Board at all.] > > Some years ago the Foundation considered the use of preferential > voting to select the board. At the time I opposed it, for reasons I > don't fully recall but which in retrospect probably boiled down to > 'I'm unfamiliar with it.' I believe that at the time we'd also have > had to write the software, which would not have been fun. But I've > come around to believing that this is a better way to run elections. > > It appears that by the time of our next election, we'll have a > third-party, free software solution available for the problem, used > recently and successfully by FreeCulture.org. > http://blog.selectricity.org/?p=4 > > I'm still trying to puzzle through the bylaws (which are a bit of a > mess wrt voting) as to what it would take to actually enact this > change (bottom line is probably that the board can just say 'it should > be this way'), but in the meantime I thought it might be good to have > a bit of discussion here around whether or not this is a good idea.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't really see the point. For the record, I strongly advocate preferential voting in situations where you are electing exactly one person. In these cases, non-preferential voting systems tend to lock out candidates. For the board elections, we are electing seven people, and we each get to cast up to seven votes. I don't think we've ever seen the list of candidates unfairly cut due to non-preferential voting. And I'm sure I've never made a strategic vote for one person instead of another I like more, simply to block another person. Any preferential voting systems is going to make the voting process more difficult. If I had had to order my votes in previous elections, I'm sure it would have been mostly arbitrary. If it's not solving any real problems, why bother? -- Shaun _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
