[Foundation-l] Voting

Dan Rosenthal swatjester at gmail.com
Mon Jun 2 01:02:19 UTC 2008


KTC, I don't mean this as a criticism of the election committee. I  
mean this as a criticism of both the Wikipedia article, and the  
MediaWiki page for the elections. It's simply not clear to voters how  
their votes will be processed unless they are familiar with all sorts  
of obscure equations. It doesn't take a committee, or a community to  
see that is something that needs to be fixed.

-Dan
On Jun 1, 2008, at 6:47 PM, Kwan Ting Chan wrote:

> On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 16:54 -0400, Dan Rosenthal wrote:
>> It wasn't for me, and I was voting. That page just says "You can do X
>> to rank your candidates. We'll pick em with the Schulze method" But
>> never actually says WHAT the schulze method is. It just says go view
>> the Wikipedia page, which for me was completely incomprehensible.
>> Actually you know where I found the best description, was on the
>> Condorcet voting article. It explains it in pretty basic terms, but I
>> think they could be generalized even farther:
>> -----
>> Rank candidates in terms of preference. First choice is 1, second is
>> 2, etc. Unranked candidates have a rank of 100, which is the lowest
>> possible rank. You may give multiple candidates the same rank if you
>> choose.
>
> Something along those lines are already in the interface.
>
>> When you submit your ballot, each candidate's preference will be
>> compared with each other candidate's preference, to see which one
>> would win in a "one on one" race. The candidate that would win the
>> most "one on one races" is the winner. For example, If you ranked
>> candidates A,B,C,D in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, then A would be the
>> winner, because A beat out three other candidates (B,C,D). B would
>> beat 2 other candidates, C would beat 1, and D would not beat any.
>>
>> In the event of a tie, where the system is unable to determine a
>> winner, the system will then drop the candidates who won by the
>> narrowest margins until there is a winner.
>
> When I first modified the software & interface, I got criticised for
> having _too much_ technical information in there that are confusing,
> hard for translator to translate, ...... So it was toned down, now the
> criticism is that there's not enough information there.
>
> The community need to decide on which side it want to come down on and
> stick to it.
>
> KTC
>
> -- 
> Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
>  - Heinrich Heine
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