Re: time to (re)consider preferential voting?

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Feb 16, 2008 6:47 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> For the board elections, we are electing seven people,
> and we each get to cast up to seven votes.  I don't
> think we've ever seen the list of candidates unfairly
> cut due to non-preferential voting.

Well, of course we haven't seen that list, since it can't exist
without having asked people to rank the candidates :)

> And I'm sure I've
> never made a strategic vote for one person instead of
> another I like more, simply to block another person.
>
> 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?

I don't think there is a huge problem here that needs to be solved,
but my instinct is that it would have made at least a small difference
in past elections. In particular, the creative commons election
exposed a situation where one candidate got a lot of first and *last*
place votes, and as a result did not make the board, and I have a
sense that something similar might have happened with us in past
elections had we practiced preferential voting.

Luis