maemo.org - Talk - Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

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Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Quote:

Originally Posted by Benson (Post 240163)

I'm a range voting fan for single-winner contests, but it's not clear to me that the likely outcome of range voting extended to a multi-winner contest is optimal.

Then you should explore the proportional score voting system (also called "reweighted range voting"), or "asset voting", described here:
http://scorevoting.net/RRV.html
http://scorevoting.net/Asset.html

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It will tend to pick centrists

Nope. See these pictures. Warren Smith explains

Quote:

Range voting with honest voters seems to exhibit little or no bias favoring or disfavoring extremists in such pictures, whereas under the strategic voter model in which Condorcet winners always win when they exist, range is totally unbiased and coincides with optimal voting in the 2D-picture scenarios.

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Thanks for those links; I'm pretty sure you gave them in the other thread, but I hadn't got back over and looked them up yet. ;)

Quote:

Originally Posted by brokenladder (Post 240189)

Nope. See these pictures. Warren Smith explains

Ah, correct. That was bad (i.e. wrong!) wording. I meant that straight multi-seat range voting (simply taking the top 5 candidates) would result in a cluster of similar (good, not centrist) candidates; i.e. it's vulnerable to cloning by the single-seat winner. (Which might not be a problem if people are more concerned about candidates' personalities than on positions in some issue space, but needs pointed out.) I'll go fix it now.

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Quote:

Originally Posted by Benson (Post 240163)

....while it could be argued that we should always have, say, at least one my-N810-is-a-laptop-you-insensitive-clod geek and one what's-this-"root"-thing-anyway mainstream type on the Council...

I could point out that someone with Easy Debian and the new GUI edition of DBus Switchboard installed could (thee-or-et-ic-ally) use their N810 as their laptop without knowing how to gain root... but that would be a combination of shameless plug and qolling.

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Quote:

Originally Posted by qgil (Post 239466)

My opinions as community member: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting

"Preferential voting (or preference voting) is a type of ballot structure used in several electoral systems in which voters rank a list or group of candidates in order of preference."

All the rest is just theory and implementation details you can skip. :)

In practice, instead of voting one best candidate (like last time) or choosing 5 candidates at the same level (like the GNOME Foundation does), each voter ranks the candidates by preference and maths do the rest.

In practice this option provides better chances to those that are consistently liked by most voters, and less chances to those more controversial being in the top for some and in the very bottom for others.

Example:

a - Zoe is a candidate, a nice person. She is not in people's mind for the top runner and for most is not even in the top 5 but everybody has her at least in the 6th position.

b - Joe is a candidate, a strong character. A minority thinks of having him as primary runner, another minority don't but still would have him as 5th candidate to get in the Council. The majority actually dislike him.

In a preferential system Zoe has more chances of being elected than Joe. In the current system Zoe has no chances and Joe will probably get in.

On a more theoric approach, the preferential system advocates that more "community inteligence" is put into use to determine who are the elected candidates. Another example:

a - Jim is an amazing candidate. Everybody loves her. A huge majority votes for her and she gets 300 votes more than needed to obtain a seat.

b - Tim and Ming are very good forerunners. A lot of people vote for any or both of them. At the end Tim gets the sit, Ming is left out - just for one vote.

How fair is that? The "inteligence" unused in the 300 extra votes from Jim could have been put into better used in a preferential system, deciding with much more ground whether Tim, Ming or both were the most supported for a seat.

Software available to do this? No idea. http://um.com.au/cgi-bin/cassandra/ is linked in the wiki page, and ther are websites offering the service for free (we used one in GNOME to determine the winner of the GUADEC logo contest a few years ago).

Its basically the same concept as my most helpful poll, but without the rankings.
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=24633

I personally think I prefer it that way, if its 5 people, the its multiple choice pick your favorite 5.

It seems possible that with your way, that a person could receive more direct votes and lose to a lesser candidate who received more secondary votes.

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Okay, just to make GA happy: I wrote the seminal paper on voting yeeears ago. For your jeering pleasure:

http://www.corpse.org/archives/issue...ews/arnold.htm

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

What's wrong with the plain "vote for 5 or fewer candidates" method (5 as that's the number we want, fewer so people don't just fill in the gaps with people they don't know anything about).

Shouldn't this accurately represent the wishes of the community. I don't really see why we should rank the choices, which has uses when you're electing and wish to also know the positioning of the elected.

Then again, I don't know anything about voting theory so please do shoot me down :)

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Quote:

Originally Posted by lardman (Post 240306)

What's wrong with the plain "vote for 5 or fewer candidates" method (5 as that's the number we want, fewer so people don't just fill in the gaps with people they don't know anything about).

It depends what you want to achieve. It certainly keeps the options for the voter simple. However, keep in mind the number of candidates is a variable.

If it is not possible to define 2 (or more) candidates as same rank it might lead to some voting for all the candidates (after the first preferred in a random order) because they'd rather not see some candidates win. That leads to sloppiness. Being able to specifiy explicitly the indifference or negative sentiment regarding candidates is a good thing IMO.

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Quote:

Originally Posted by lardman (Post 240306)

What's wrong with the plain "vote for 5 or fewer candidates" method (5 as that's the number we want, fewer so people don't just fill in the gaps with people they don't know anything about).

What if I do take the time to research all the candidates? In the last mayoral election here in San Francisco, we had like 10 choices.

If people don't know enough about a candidate, they can just give him a zero - which is what you're proposing we force them to do.

We can even allow an "abstain" option, and look at average scores instead of totals.

Quote:

Shouldn't this accurately represent the wishes of the community. I don't really see why we should rank the choices, which has uses when you're electing and wish to also know the positioning of the elected.

I'm not proposing ranking, I'm proposing rating. The reason why is, to pick better winners, as measured via Bayesian regret:
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegDum.html

If you are a sane rational person, then you want the greatest expected happiness with election results. Therefore you want the best voting method possible, so you aren't forced to be any less happy than you could be.

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Then again, I don't know anything about voting theory so please do shoot me down :)

Too late. :D

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Well, since nobody's discussing, I've unilaterally made up my mind, and now anyone who thinks different shall be obliged to overcome my biases to persuade me. :p

I'm gonna say we want proportional representation, and, much as I really, really, really like asset voting, I think people aren't gonna like it, so I propose reweighted range voting. I'm gonna go write it up on the wiki over the weekend, but here's brokenladder's link again for those who missed it the first time around (you guys get a SNEAK PREVIEW!!):
http://scorevoting.net/RRV.html.

Re: Defining the Maemo Community Council voting procedure

Quote:

Originally Posted by Benson (Post 242008)

I'm gonna say we want proportional representation, and, much as I really, really, really like asset voting, I think people aren't gonna like it, so I propose reweighted range voting. I'm gonna go write it up on the wiki over the weekend, but here's brokenladder's link again for those who missed it the first time around (you guys get a SNEAK PREVIEW!!):
http://scorevoting.net/RRV.html.

Are you going to write it up, or do I need to dive in, figure out what it is and write it up? (I'm fine either way, it is my responsibility to see it finished this month, so whatever needs to be done needs to be done. Just realize that my understanding of voting theory is next to none and anything I write up is likely to be flawed. ;))