[snip plenty of good discussion] On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 10:33 +0900, James Henstridge wrote: > On 17/02/2008, Shaun McCance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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? > > Is it really that much more difficult to order a list of ten > candidates as opposed to selecting 7 out of the 10?
I don't want to drag this argument out, and I'm not going to fight against preferential voting if that's what people want. But yes, I really do think it's hard to order a list of ten candidates. I don't usually even select seven out of ten. In the last election, I selected maybe four or five. Why? Because I just don't have a strong enough opinion on the others, and I think a random vote is worse than no vote. > Even if you aren't sure of a total ordering, you can probably pick a > few candidates that you definitely want elected (put them at the top) > and some candidates you definitely don't want elected (put them at the > bottom). You might decide to order the remainder randomly if you > don't care about them. If, as your argument above indicates, this ordering can have drastic impacts on the outcome of the vote, I would not want to order them randomly. Would the system still allow me to order my top five, and abstain of everybody else? A voting system that doesn't allow abstaining has problems. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
