Re: Geez.

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 09:33:34PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Yow, Debian uses a ludicrously complicated voting system.
>
> How was it chosen in the first place anyway?

I'm not sure if you're talking about the existing constitution or
the proposed change.  You don't say.  If you're really interested
in the topic, you might want to give a bit more detail about what
kind interest you have.

> (Personally, I'm an approval voting fan.  Easy to understand, and 
> particularly good when the most important thing is to avoid causing a 
> furious schism.)

Well, to be fair, all of our existing votes could be converted to approval
voting (by assuming that explicit preference over the default option is
approval), such that we'd still get the same winner on each ballot.

And, to be fair, it's simple to describe approval voting.

However, approval voting doesn't let you say "I like all these logos, but
I like swirl better than dg, dg better than old, old better than fixed
chicken, fixed chicken better than modified, modified better than ants
and ants better than seal."  Deciding what to vote on when there's a lot
of acceptable choices is a rather complex exercise with approval voting.

The complexity you're objecting to almost never comes into play.  However,
if there are a lot of good options on the ballot, both the system we
already have and the system we're proposing would give better results
than approval voting: we're getting more information from the voters
about which choice is the right one.

By contrast, with approval voting, a ballot with a lot of good options
is less meaningful.

Why would you want that?

-- 
Raul