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

Sat Jun 7 19:49:52 UTC 2008

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 3:03 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I ranked the people I had an opinion about, and then for the
> remaining candidates that I do not particularly want to be board
> members, I didn't try to figure out their relative position to one
> another but just left them unranked, since I thought that would mean
> they are all ranked as "equally low preference -- do not want" by the
> software. The directions sort of indicated that is what to do.

Unranked choices are effectively treated the same as though they were
all ranked with a single value which is one greater than the highest
value you selected.

> However, you're saying that it's better if all choices are ranked,
> even if I give several people a "99" by hand?

No, that wasn't my intent.   Rather:  It's important that you really
understand that you *can* rank more than one,  and that doing so
doesn't really dilute your #1 preference.   (I've talked to people who
think their vote counts more if they concentrate it on a single #1 and
don't rank the rest)

Making ranking all of them mandatory would be one way of getting that
message through to voters. It would potentially prevent some forms of
confusion such as "you should leave all you do not want unranked",
which is only reasonable advice if you do-not-want them all exactly
equally since a ballot marked 1, 2, 1, Unranked, 2, Unranked, Unranked
is functionally equal to 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 3.

> Or should I take the
> time to uniquely rank them? I'm not sure I understand why that's
> better given the outcome I want, which is for none of those people to
> become board members.

You should uniquely rank them if you think some are worse than others.

So in an election between Batman, Superman, Wonderwoman, Fidel Castro,
Frankenstein,  and Satan  lets assume you prefer Wonderwoman, think
Batman and Superman would be okay.  You think the rest suck but think
Fidel Castro the worst of the ones you dislike.

A reasonable ballot given those preferences might be

Batman 2
Superman 2
Wonderwoman 1
Fidel Castro 4
Frankenstein 3
Satan 3

You could also leave Fidel Castro unranked but that would have exactly
the same effect on the election.  If you were to leave the three you
don't want unranked you would be failing to demonstrate your
preference among them.

> It will be interesting to see if a bunch of foundation-l readers
> revote after this thread :)

Indeed.

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Ryan <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you rank everyone, giving them a "99" by hand is no different than
> leaving them unranked (which is, for all intents and purposes, giving them a
> "100")
[snip]

It's important to note that the numbers are there as data entry
lubricant. Their absolute values have no meaning, only the relative
ranking that they describe. (This isn't a borda count)

That is,  if the highest of your ranked values is 3 and you fill in
all the unranked with 4 that has the same effect as ranking them all
as 99 or leaving them unranked.

Effectively, your ballot is converted to an ordered list of sets of
strict preference:

Wonderwoman > Superman, Batman >  Frankenstein, Satan > Fidel Castro

> Uniquely ranking the candidates you don't like doesn't help or hurt them
> with respect to the candidates you do like.  All that does is say that you
> prefer "Unlikable Candidate A" over "Unlikable Candidate B", and if your
> likable candidate is not elected, you're saying that you'd want A before B.

Pretty much.

Schulze method does not not have the "Later-no-harm criterion", so
your less preferred choices *can* influence results related to your
higher preferred choices.  But, unlike approval or borda Schulze's
failure to meet later-no-harm doesn't translate into an obvious usable
strategy in the general case.