Ties in Elections

[Branden Robinson / SPI Treasurer]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 09:23:02PM +0100, Peter Palfrader wrote:
> On Thu, 06 Feb 2003, Branden Robinson / SPI Treasurer wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 07:25:17AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > I suppose not voting for all 8 candidate (that is providing a string
> > > with less than 8 characters) will result in "none of the above" to rank
> > > higher than the candidates not figuring in the string, right ?
> > 
> > It certainly should, or the vote tabulating software is horrendously
> > buggy and should not be trusted to return valid results.
> 
> "none of the above" is no option in this elections.  Is there any reason
> it should have been?

Well, I would say so, yes.  It gives people a way to explicitly protest
the entire ballot, or mark the entire slate of candidates as
unacceptable.

Though I think it's not very likely that a person would actually vote
that way in this particular election, I don't know how important that
is.

> As I understand this scheme if you don't rank an option you make no
> statement about your preference for or against it at all.

Hmm.  I may be misunderstanding Condorcet, having been polluted by
months of chatter on debian-vote about properties that Condorcet does
not possess, like "quorum"[1], "supermajority", and "default option".

I retract my statement about the software being buggy if it doesn't
support this.  I'm in favor of seeing plain-jane Condorcet with
Cloneproof/SSD in operation.

If this method turns out to have undesirable properties, then at least
we and the Debian Project will have real experiential data to work with,
which may help supplement the rampant speculation that has been taking
place on debian-vote.

Thanks for the correction.

[1] Yes, I am aware that there is a quorum requirement for this
election.  However, it's not the same as the per-option quorum
requirement advocated by Anthony Towns et al. on debian-vote, and since
our ballot has no "default option" I'm pretty sure our quorum
requirement behaves even more differently.  Since our By-laws require
that we seat at least one new Board member to get up to our required
minimum of 8, a ballot marking everyone below "none of the above" isn't
particularly helpful.  If the election mechanism were to fail the Board
would try it again until it succeeded, or go back to internally
selecting (a) new member(s), as it's done in the past.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson, Treasurer
Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
treasurer at spi-inc.org
http://www.spi-inc.org/
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