Re: preferential voting, take N

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Luis Villa wrote:
> Unfortunately, I'd hoped that selectricity would be ready for our use
> by this time; I see no indication on their blog that new source or
> feature releases have been made, unfortunately, which may make it
> inappropriate. Mako? :)

If we wanted to do STV, I will be integrating STV into the maemo voting
system (which is the same as the GNOME one) most likely in the coming
months, and would be happy to share info.

The basics stay the same: a slightly modified database schema to allow
for preferential votes, a slightly modified web app to constrain the
user to casting a valid ballot, and a slightly modified version of
openstv counting the votes. Automatically generating the results and the
token verification code probably needs some changing, but it shouldn't
be anything too complicated I hope...

We're currently in a debate phase, with some people insisting that RRV
is a better system to use, but I think we're probably going to end up
using STV when all is said and done. Interestingly for a Debian based
project, for the moment no-one has suggested using Condorcet, thank God.

> So I think if the board wants to change this,
> we can do it, but obviously we'd (1) want to get feedback and (2) we'd
> want to ensure that there is bandwidth to ensure that the new process
> works.

I'm all for avoiding unnecessary elections - as far as I'm concerned the
voting method is an implementation detail, the important thing is that
the will of the membership be expressed in the election. Preferential
voting does a better job of this than multi-vote first past the post.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org