More About Preferential Voting

[kevin_standlee]

There's one thing in it that doesn't apply to WSFS elections (you're not required to number all the candidates; WSFS allows you to leave candidates blank), but this cartoon explains preferential voting very well and also says why you should vote your first preference for the candidate you really wish could win even if you don't think that candidate is likely to win.

Thanks to Ed Dravecky for pointing this out.

Comments

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

It's too late for this year (and there's too much other business, anyway) but how would you feel about a proposal to adopt a Condorcet counting method for Site Selection (and perhaps even for Hugo Voting)? There's still the Arrow's Impossibility Theorem that would need a tie-breaker (reference to the BM for Site Selection, joint winners or No Award for a Hugo category) but it would reduce the possibility of a known failure mode of instant run-off from leading to a perverse result. OK, it would lengthen the counting time and complexity, but not beyond the reasonable capacities of a Worldcon and bids to staff, surely. Particularly if we discouraged silly write-ins (Monkey's eh-brow and the like).
I do worry that this year we might end up with the following type of situation:

A: 35% Rank 1
B: 33% Rank 1
C: 32% Rank 1

C is eliminated and their votes redistributed, leading to, say, A winning. However, if we wre to examin the second-preferences of A and B and find that in both cases a large majority of them voted C as their second rank vote, then in any two-way A v C or B v C race C would win, while with instant run-off A or B wins due to the very minor differences in numbers of Rank 1 ballots cast.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

While I understand the attraction of adding more complexity to the system to achieve a "better" solution, I am very leery of trying to change the fundamental nature of the voting system. It's taken fifty years to get people vaguely used to instant-runoff voting.

I'm not worried about hoax write-in votes. In WSFS rules, if you don't have a winner after Round 1, you eliminate all of the ineligible candidates and redistribute their votes; therefore, they can't actually deadlock the election.

(Westercon's rules are different which is why the Westercon 66 site selection was thrown to the Business Meeting; however, the votes for Granzella's were in fact as much protest votes against an extremely weak "real" bid, similar to voting None of the Above, but actually giving the weak bid an last chance by convincing the Business Meeting that they weren't as weak as they looked.)