Election results

[MJ Ray]

David Graham <cdlu at railfan.ca> wrote:
> It should be noted that the electoral system used is likely to change
> voting behaviour, so this discussion can be fairly moot.

To some extent, but if people know what they're voting under SPI's
system, and they're not tactical-voting (I agree with Wouter Verhelst
http://grep.be/blog//en/life/politics/voting_tactics_II?show_comments=yes
about tactical voting) - that is, that a vote of ABCDEF for candidates
A-F really does mean that they prefer A to everybody, B to C and so on
- then the votes would be the same for several systems.

Not Approval Voting, as you rightly point out, but STV, SSTV, AV and
FPTP are valid comparisons, aren't they?  Maybe the other Condorcets
too?  Do the SPI votes fail those conditions, or did I miss something?

[...alphabet effect]
> This isn't terribly surprising. [...]
> [... Late nomination] suggests that you will not be active in board
> activity while [overt reaction to the existing candidates] suggests
> you may be too judgemental to make a good board member.

The other comments about early nomination are good points, well made.

This might not be terribly surprising to experienced SPI candidates,
but it did surprise me, as I'd not really thought of it like that.
Most elections I've voted in group and publish all nominations
together in one round.  OTTOMH, I can only think of SPI and debian
doing it like this, where you publicise your own candidature without
restriction on campaigning.  I guess this will increase as more voting
moves online and more society members communicate with each other
directly, rather than through moderated mailings, so we're blazing a
trail again!

There are many reasons possible for a nomination date, so relatively
late nomination doesn't suggest future inactivity to me (as long as
the nomination is well before the deadline!), but I think very early
nomination means you were going to stand no matter what.  That may or
may not be a good thing.

I'm used to candidates reacting to each other overtly from debian's
debate/rebuttals system, so I didn't expect that to be a problem in
SPI elections.  I may have misjudged that one.

SPI election results were ABCDEF, ABD, AB, ABD, GBE.  (That G who
totally flouts the alphabet effect is Bruce Perens.  The unelected
A was Scott Dier and C was one David Graham.)

Finally, a list of the last three year's DPL nomination dates is
http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/07/msg00178.html
in summary:
2007 - nominations 4th-24th, winner nominated on 14th (11th day);
2006 -  5th-26th, winner on 23rd (19th day);
2005 -  7th-27th, winner on 27th (21st day);
and before that:
2004 -  7th-28th, winner on 15th (9th day);
2003 - 24th-14th, winner on 13th (21st day);
2002 -  6th-27th, winner on 13th (8th day);
2001 - 24th-13th, winner on 24th (1st day);
2000 -  9th-31st, winner on 26th (17th day);
1999 - predates the archive I'm using.

Would anyone like to suggest why SPI has a different nomination-date
effect to debian?  (Be gentle...)

Thanks,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
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