2009/6/25 john palmieri <[email protected]>: > Is it really fair if people can't agree on how it works? Seems to go > against the GNOME principle of simplicity by adding more choices to fix some > of the issues of voting. I'm all for making things more fair but I'm not > sure the complexity actually fixes things or hides the issues under a layer > of complexity. In any case the final decision should be well documented on > how it was reached. If at all possible, done by hand showing the work at > each step.
I'm not familiar with STV but I did read something here and there within the past two days. From what I understood the issue is about transferring surplus votes from candidates who passed the quota. Say the candidate has 60 votes (first choice in the ballot) and the quota to be elected is 40 then 20 surplus votes have to be transferred (i.e. switched to the second preference in the ballot). How do you pick those 20 votes? You have basically two choices (and *several* variants): - with Random Transfer, 20 ballots are picked randomly (assuming those 60 votes are already random you can just pick last 20 received, first 20, or more complex randomizing methods). The thing is that this way you completely lose the second order preference of the remaining 40 ballots and assume the 20 ones you randomly picked are a representative enough sample. - with Fractional Transfer you don't transfer a sample but *all* the 60 ballots with a fractional weight that makes them sum up to the surplus (20 in the example). This way you're caring about all preferences of all ballots, giving a clearly fairer representation of the electors' desires. The only downside of this method it that it is more complex, to apply not to understand (i.e. you cannot count ballots by hand), but given that we're already using a software to count the ballots I really don't see the point. In my opinion, if the original decision of the election committee is not clear (and "we wanted to use the same method of Maemo" IMHO is not a decision), we should just use the fairest method, which is undoubtedly fractional transfer. Quoting from http://www.openstv.org/votingmethods/random: "It is important to note is that changing the order of the ballots can change the outcome of the election. In reality, this will only happen in a close election. However, many people find this aspect disturbing." I don't speak and understand english very well but from what I understood about the meaning of "close election" ours certainly is, we're electing 7 candidates over 10 with 211 ballots, there is no need to do the math to understand that the order of the ballots can change the results. Random transfer might work well when you have big numbers but can easily be unfair in a little election like this. Filippo PS. In case it wasn't clear, this is a +1 to Dave's challenge :-P _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
