[maemo-community] [Council] Voting system progress?

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> With only a couple of months left in our (first?) term, I was
> wondering where we'd got on updating the voting system for the next
> election?
> 
> Some kind of range voting seemed to get a lot of traction on ITT from
> some election experts; but was dependent on being written up in a way
> which makes sense in plain English.

Honestly, I'm not a fan of range voting. What's wrong with preferential
voting, which is easier for voters? Single Transerrable Vote, Schultze,
and Condorcet are all available as counting methods for these - I prefer
the easy-to-understand STV over the others, and we have software that
does STV counts.

> Time is a factor, as any changes to the voting procedure (and hence
> the Council's constitution) needs to be ratified by a referendum (last
> point under http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Community_Council#Elections).

Now that I read this, indeed, we say one vote per person, the 5
candidates with the most votes get elected.

I don't like premature red tape, but if you want to run a referendum to
say that voting should be using a preferential voting system, with a
counting system to be decided by the council before the start of the
election, and that the 5 candidates who win the election get elected,
I'm fine with that.

I don't think you should get more specific than that on saying exactly
what system will be used for exactly this reason - we'll end up having
annual referenda to change what should be implementation details.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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