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

Sat Jun 7 12:20:51 UTC 2008

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 1:57 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>> 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'd love to see stats on that. My bet is that a many will rank only a
> few,  because of lacking patience, or a belief that they are helping
> their primary choices win like on an  approval vote. ::shrugs::
>
> One improvement might be to force people to rank all the candidates
> (not uniquely rank, just rank).  I'm sure some would give up voting if
> they couldn't just put a "1" next to their favorite, but would biasing
> the election towards the choices of people who are more patient be all
> that bad? ;)
>
I dunno.  Is it really worth it to waste thousands of person-hours
having each voter ponder the order of their 5th and 6th choice,
neither of whom they've heard of prior to the election?  How much
useful stuff could get done during that time?  Yes, I realize you said
"not uniquely rank, just rank", but you also seem to suggest that
spending lots of time on this process is a good thing.

I wish I could somehow get more of a sense of which 3 or 4 candidates
actually have a good chance of winning. I might spend a little more
time thinking about these candidates if I did.  As is, I really have
no clue who's going to win.

---
"Wikipedia seems extremely inscrutable to outsiders. You're sort of
entirely in the world or you're not, and there's very few of us I
think on the outside who know where to begin to wade in. There's 85
redundant channels for certain things to get discussed, so that's the
challenge it presents to me, but I don't know if I have any good
advice on what should be done about it." - Brian Bergstein, Not the
Wikipedia Weekly, episode #11