Re: About the voting rules

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 03:25:25PM -0800, Adrian Custer wrote:
> 1) voting for no one actually has an important function, one very
> different from not voting. There is no reason this should invalidate a
> ballot. The ballot should be added to the total tally and no votes cast.

The way votes are counted now, this has absolutely no effect on the result.
If you just want to say "I'm not voting for anyone", then you can just say
that on the mailing list.

Also since all the data is available, we could always also look at how many
such "empty" ballots were cast if it was a significant number and we really
wanted to know.  Them being valid or invalid for the actual voting makes no
difference however.  A ballot being invalid just means it won't add any votes
to any of the candidates, which is exactly what an empty ballot does.

> 2) duplicate names should not prevent the ballot from working, they are
> merely useless. These votes should simply be discarde, not the ballot
> itself.

I tend to agree on this one.  From a mathematical point of view, we should
consider the ballot a "set" and thus containing no duplicate "points" (votes)
even if in some presentation we do give multiple points.

Although.  Perhaps we can think of this as an inteligence test.  If you can't
pass the test (that is: if you can't read/follow instructions), you get no
voice :)

> I'm sure the committee has thought about this and maybe decided the
> extra effort (parsing, cross-checking or whatever) outweighed the
> benefits of accepting these ballots. Still in a perfect foundation,
> these rules would be different.

Can't think that fixing #2 would be more then an extra 5 minutes of work.
Probably far less time then it took for you to write this email and for me to
reply.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
   cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
                       -- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)