Re: Nov 19 draft of voting amendment
Branden Robinson wrote:
Yes, it does. See the flamewar about non-free on debian-devel. Giving
people their opportunity to explicitly express their preference for the
status quo (", damnit!") is a good thing, if someone can be bothered to
propose that as an amendment to the proposed GR, and if it acquires
enough seconds live on its own.
"FURTHER DISCUSSION" is not highly communicative. When ranked first, it
tells you relatively little about the voter's intent.
I am wondering if it is really a good idea to always have a do-nothing,
futher-discussion option that is the default. It may be better to make
these get proposed and seconded like any other option, and make them
have to fight for victory just like every other option.
Hmmm, so if I make a suggested amendment to the Debian Constitution
(such as "Replace all instances of the word 'Concorde' in connection
with the voting system with the word 'Condorcet'. Rationale: This was
clearly a misspelling or mistake in the original drafting of the
Constitution"), that no one on Debian-Vote appears to object to, the
ballot should look like this:
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Rank all options in order of preference. Unranked options will be
considered equal to each other and ranked lower than any ranked options.
[ ] AMEND the Constitution as per Proposed Amendment I, above.
Sign your completed ballot with your Debian PGP key, and send it to....
--------------------
My opinion is that that is a stupid ballot. There should always be a
method to reject a proposal, unless there is some good reason not to.
What would be a good reason not to? Imagine the following resolution,
hypothetically enacted:
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Be it RESOLVED, that the Debian Project shall adopt a mascot, and that
the Debian Project Leader shall appoint five Debian Developers to review
and select at least five candidate mascots by no later than three months
from the date of this reolution. The Debian Developers shall select,
by vote, a mascot from among the selected candidate mascots.
-------------------------------------
This is a case where I can see there being no default option, no
none-of-the-above, and no "further discussion" either.
But that's an exception, because the decision to do something was
already made, the only thing remaining is a choice over what to do.
When the decision to do something hasn't been made, there needs to be a
"do nothing" choice of some sort.
If we retain a quorum requirement in terms of a minimum number of
ballots that have to be received before the result will be formally
tabulated, then "FURTHER DISCUSSION default options" are even less
necessary because people can just "indifference" a proposal to death.
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