Re: Per-item "quorum" and truncated ballots

[moth@magenta.com]

On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 05:24:59PM -0400, Buddha Buck wrote:
> Imagine a vote along the lines of:
> 100 ballots of the form:
>    [1] Red,    [ ] Blue,    [ ] Default
> 
> 100 ballots of the form:
>    [1] Red,    [ ] Blue,    [1] Default
> 
> 25 ballots of the form:
>    [ ] Red,    [1] Blue,    [ ] Default
>
> with an R of 105.

I presume you mean with a quorum of 105.  Which would mean that we have
something like 44100 debian developers.

> The defeats matrix looks like
>       Red   Blue   Default
> Red   ---   200      100
> Blue  25    ---       25
> Def    0    100       ---
> 
> In this example, Red is the IDW, and absolutely no one thought that Red 
> was worse than the default option.  Yet Red is rejected because fewer 
> than 105 people thought it was better than the default option, so 
> default wins.
> 
> Is this the "expected" behavor?

Out of more than fourty thousand debian developers, less than one hundred
stated that they preferred red over the vote defaulting?

Yes, I'd say that this is the expected behavior.  Those other votes,
which rank red and default equally above blue, constitute votes against
blue, not votes for red.  Those people would have accepted red as being
no worse than the current situation, but they didn't actively think it
was a good idea.

[same applies for your subsequent example.]

-- 
Raul