On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 08:43:44AM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote:
> On 21-Nov-00, 03:42 (CST), Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 12:30:28AM -0800, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > > On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Buddha Buck wrote:
> > > Here's how it would work. Voters rank all candidates or options, but also
> > > put in a "cut line" above which all candidates/options are approved, and
> > > below which, no candidates/options are approved. One could create a dummy
> > > candidate to achieve this if the ballot isn't conducive to the "cut line"
> > > idea.
> > Presumably the "further discussion" option that's on all ballots would
> > work for this?
> No, not at all. Consider the recent small discussion about removing
> non-free (I'm sure you can find it in the archives if you missed it). I
> personally would have ranked in the order Against, Favor, Further
> Discussion (i.e. I'd rather the damn thing pass than see any more
> discussion about it), but my "approval line" would be between the first
> two options.
If your "approval line" is set to reject "favour", then you've said you
*wouldn't* rather it pass, though. If your approval vote (or one like
yours) is to matter, you've either ended up with:
* Against is found to be preferred to Favour and wins
* Favour is preferred to Against, and loses
But you've just said you'd rather the damn thing pass than see any more
discussion about it, so your vote shouldn't make the damn thing lose,
surely?
> > c) A tie for first place where all the winners beat further
> > discussion, but the winner selected by whichever tie breaker's
> > used requires a supermajority that it doesn't have, and one of
> > the other winners has all the majority it needs (because it only
> > requires a smaller one, say)
> I'm not sure it really makes any sense to have alternatives with
> different majority requirements[1].
Option A: ``The Debian developers resolve to change the social contract
to remove all mention of non-free, and to remove non-free and contrib
from the archive.''
Option B: ``The Debian developers resolve to change the social contract to
remove all mention of non-free, and to remove non-free from the archive.''
Option C: ``The Debian developers resolve to move contrib and non-free to
a secondary archive, and to create an official.debian.org alias to more
clearly indicate which packages provide the official Debian distribution.''
Are three different compromises on the same topic, the first two which
would (supposing Manoj's proposal succeeds) require supermajorities to
change the social contract, while the latter of which would require only
a simple majority.
Note that one of the ideas for Condorcet voting is that presenting
multiple compromises for consideration *doesn't* mean any particular
one of them is less likely to win simply because of how the votes end
up getting counted, rather than because less people like it.
> The recent case of an ammendment
> that had an (arguably) different requirement than the original GR came
> from two issues:
> 2. An "ammendment" that was basically a refutation of the original GR.
You're saying we should never have:
Option D: ``The Debian developers resolve to continue support non-free
as a valid and useful task of the Debian project, even though it does
not form a part of the Debian distribution itself.''
and allow people to vote DCFAB, say? With only options A, B, and C,
I'd probably be left voting CFAB (since C's not unacceptable to me, it's
just not ideal), which would encourage C to win, even though it's *not*
what I want.
If we can cope with "no" votes, we ought to be able to cope with shadings
of "no" as well.
> Or perhaps the best answer is to require seperate votes on such issues
> (modifications of the Constitution and other issues that require
> super-majorities:
> 1. First vote to determine what combination of GR+ammendment(s) will be
> considered (using a simple Condorcet winner).
> 2. Vote on whether to accept the final proposal. Since this is a simple
> yes/no, determining a super-majority is trivial.
This is what we do right now, and it doesn't seem to work too
well. (Requiring too many votes, encouraging insincere voting to make
all alternatives fail, etc)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Thanks to all avid pokers out there''
-- linux.conf.au, 17-20 January 2001
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