Re: [gentoo-nfp] Thoughts on upcoming trustee elections

[Aron Griffis]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:	[Sun May 01 2005, 04:13:12AM EDT]
> I mean you can't even understand the results without a detailed
> analysis. I was following the recent DPL elections, and at the end it
> was basically, "Branden won, but nobody really seems to have a good
> understanding of why or how."
>
> For example, this post: http://lwn.net/Articles/131551/
>
> "        The results are posted at
>  http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/leader2005_results.txt
>  http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/leader2005_results.png
>   The tally sheet is at:
>  http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/leader2005_tally.txt
>   The list of people voting is at:
>  http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/leader2005_voters.txt"
>
> None of which make _any_ sense to me with the exception of the voters list.

Well, they didn't do a good job of pointing to supporting URLs.  The
two comments following the one you referenced are quite helpful.

> Perhaps a voting method that regular people can actually understand
> intuitively would be more helpful.

The only voting method that people understand intuitively is plurality
voting, used in most democratic countries in the world.  It has the
unfortunate result of favoring one extreme or the other; that is the
reason that the U.S. has only two viable parties.  Just because the
method is intuitive and in wide use does not mean that it is fair or
that it is the best for Gentoo.

To be honest, now that I've seen what Debian has for voting, that's
exactly what I'd like to see in Gentoo, EXCEPT that I'd like to make
sure people aren't purely confused by it.  The reason they posted all
those numbers was for the sake of transparency, not for the sake of
explanation.  As one commenter noted, the explanation is available in
other documents.

Here is Condorcet voting in a nutshell:

    Ballots are counted by considering all possible sets of
    two-candidate elections from all available candidates. That is,
    each candidate is considered against each and every other
    candidate. A candidate is considered to "win" against another on
    a single ballot if they are ranked higher than their opponent. All
    the votes for candidate Alice over candidate Bob are counted, as
    are all of the votes for Bob over Alice. Whoever has the most
    votes in each one-on-one election wins.

That is a quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
which goes into a lot more detail.

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer