Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections Spring 2009 - Preliminary results

[john palmieri <john j5 palmieri gmail com>]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 4:58 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

Stormy Peters wrote:

I too think the election committee should just decide.

(From board discussions, I'm pretty confident they wanted to do it however Maemo does it, but at this point I think the election committee should decide.)

I'd replace "decide" with "clarify" here - it's clear there was an intention, and now we're in something of a niche situation, where we just need a clarification from the committee what method they intended to use - then we just count with that.

I prefer fractional transfer because its results are deterministic, they will not be different if you run the election 10 different times. That isn't true of random transfer (which is a real world compromise to make hand-counting big elections feasible). But if that's not what the election committee intended, then so be it, we'll count it the other way, organise a hand check, and be done with it.

Having counted the election by hand yesterday, I can tell you that the hand count will come down to a 1 or 2 vote difference between Sri and Jorge for the last seat, and Vincent, Behdad, German, Brian and Diego will be elected.

I would say then with such a small sampling size where randomness can change results (it is like saying, lets flip a coin to see if Sri or Jorge gets elected) we should go with fractional transfer going forward.  I suspect the last few candidates will always end up in this situation.  However in this election, unless you can document that this was indeed the committee's intent you need to at least go back to the two candidates in question and get their opinions.  The committee stating it was their intent after the fact is not good enough.  The committee stating they wanted to do it how maemo did it without actually looking how maemo did it is an even deeper issue.

If the committee is not willing to acknowledge an issue and simply says it isn't worth the trouble to either document their intent or find another equitable way to resolve who gets the last seat then I have deep reservations about using the STV voting method in future elections.

--
John