[Foundation-l] Board vote, need a bit of help

Sat Jun 7 03:02:49 UTC 2008

On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think cloning resistance is highly relevant
>
> Otherwise, I generally don't like condorcet methods for these kinds of
> elections. (the normal failure to meet later-no-harm and
> invulnerability to burying being my primary concerns with most
> condorcet methods)
>
Personally I see an argument that a voluntary organization has much
less of a need to pick a compromise candidate than a government.  If
you're picking the capital of Tennessee, fine, you pick something in
the middle.  But change it to a vote for a Wikimedia board member and
it might be better to fully satisfy as many people as possible and let
those with radically different viewpoints fork off their own projects
than to dilute the core project principles with compromise.  I'm not
sure if I agree with this or not, though.

I agree that cloning resistance is very important, though, so
plurality voting seems out.  Why not IRV?

> Approval voting is generally claimed to meet the Independence of
> clones criterion, but in most approval elections I've seen (Including
> Wikimedia's), many people vote insincerely/strategically and approve
> only a single person just like a plurality vote ... so ultimately
> cloning results in spoilage.
>
Well, technically, if your two top candidates are really *identical*,
there would be no strategic reason to not approve of both.  Back to
reality, though, it could be that people are voting strategically, or
it could be that they just don't understand what they're doing.  If
the latter, this could happen with the Schulze method as well.  People
might rank one candidate "1" and leave all the rest blank.  There
wouldn't be a strategic reason to do this (would there?), but it still
might happen.

I'm interested in whether or not we'll even know if this happened.
How much data are we going to be given about the votes?