Hi all,

As Crashanddie has already said, the Q1 2010 Maemo Community Council election is closed, and the results are in. The results are now online:

http://maemo.org/vote/results.php?election_id=9


Congratulations to Randall Arnold, Andrew Flegg, Attila Csipa, Javier S. Pedro, and Ryan Abel on their election, and my commiserations to the candidates who were not elected, without whom there would not have been an election.

I encourage any of you so inclined to download the ballots file and reproduce the results, as Crashanddie did this morning, and post your analyses of voting patterns and other punditry here or on the community mailing list:

http://maemo.org/vote/blt.php?election_id=9

This election had the highest number of votes since we have had a karma condition on voting.

For information, there were 399 votes out of an electorate of 3485, giving a turnout of 11.45%, compared to the last election, where there were 303 votes out of an electorate of 2339, or a turnout of 12.95%.

The decreased turnout percentage can be explained by the new karma formula and the N900 release, which have resulted in a larger electorate.

As I mentioned on IRC, there have been at least 2 cases of elections which might have had a different result if a different counting method were chosen in the recent past - the GNOME board of directors result was quite controversial because of this, for example.

Fractional transfer STV has a few nice benefits: the result is reproducible, and can be run manually. You get to vote for candidates in order of preference, so you can vote for your actual favourite candidate instead of trying to strategically vote for the candidate who might need your votes to get elected. If your favourite candidate is eliminated, the other guy will get your vote anyway in the end.

We had a very very long debate on voting methods and counting methods a while back, and even held a referendum on the issue because people felt so strongly about it.

STV has a huge impact. What has a small impact (but often a decisive one) is the counting method that's used to count the STV votes. If you use Borda you can get different results to fractional transfer or random transfer.

In today's election, first past the post would have given the same result, since transfers went pretty evenly to Attila, JaviSPedro and andy80, but in last GNOME election: http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/res...election_id=13 Lucas Rocha went from 6th place to 3rd place with transfers, and Diego Escalante Urrelo took the last seat when starting in 8th place, inching ahead of Jorge Castro, who was 5th in 1st preference votes.

Dave.