Re: Nov 19 draft of voting amendment

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

> >     2. We drop the weakest defeats from the Schwartz set until there
> >        are no more defeats in the Schwartz set:

On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 05:41:31PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> IMO this "Schwarz set" jargon just comes out of the blue here and is
> likely going to be sort of jarring to the uninitiated.  I think a
> sentence or so of preamble to thie clause would be a good idea.
> 
> Here's my suggestion:
> 
>   We use the Condorcet voting method with Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential
>   Dropping, along with modifications to accomodate quorum and
>   supermajority requirements, described below.  We determine possible
>   winning options by constructing a Schwartz set; we then drop the weakest
>   defeats from the Schwartz set until there are no more defeats in the
>   Schwartz set.
> 
> (I think it is good, but not essential, to credit our system's origins.)

Um... Could you spell out your reasoning a bit more, here?

I mean, are we trying to bore people to sleep so they won't be jarred
by new concepts, or what?

> >          i. A defeat (R,S) is dropped by making N(S,R) the same as N(R,S).
> >             Once a defeat is dropped it must stay dropped.
> 
> Replace second sentence:
> 
>   Once a defeat is dropped from the Schwartz set it is never re-added.

I'm not comfortable with this because there is not just one schwartz
set but a sequence of them.  So it's possible that an option could
appear in a later schwartz set through an interpretation where only the
most recent schwartz set is considered when deciding which defeats are
currently dropped.

> >     3. The winning option is picked from among the options T in the
> >        final Schwartz set where N(T,X) is larger than the quorum Q and
> >        X is the default option.  If there is no quorum, or if no quorum
> >        has been specified, Q is 1.  If there's more than one option to
> 
> (really minor stylistic annoying nitpcik ) s/there's/there is/

Would you believe I spent almost fifteen minutes waffling back and forth
on that very issue?

> >        pick, from, the person with the casting vote picks the winner
> 
> The first comma is extraneous.

Yeah, definitely too many commas there.

> >        from these options.  If there's no options to pick from, the
> 
> s/there's/there are/

Ah... you're no fun.  ;-)

Ok, I'll expunge "there's" from the next draft (probably Thursday).

-- 
Raul