Range Voting

[kevin_standlee]

The folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster, sfrose) lobbying WSFS to change its voting system from the Instant Runoff Voting system we currently use for site selection and the Hugo Awards. Sharon told them how our rules work and suggested that if they want to change them, they come to WSFS business meetings and propose and debate the changes there, like all other rule changes. The advocate's response, in my opinion, amounted to, "Our proposal is so obviously Right that we shouldn't have to do all that hard, expensive work. You should change your rules because we tell you to do so."

I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.

WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.

Comments

Counting IRV Ballots

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Really? Can it be adopted for Site Selection? Or would data entry be the bottleneck?

Yes and yes. If I'd thought it would have sped things up, I would have put you in contact with the programmer, since we used it for Hugo ballot counting.

For a single race with <5 candidates where you only need to know the winner (that is, you don't want or need 2nd, 3rd, etc.), you can count 2000 IRV ballots by hand faster than you could key the information into the counting program. The Hugos need the program because there are 15 categories, at least six candidates (usually) for each category, and we want to know each placement. Oh, and the administrator has a couple of weeks between close of balloting and when s/he has to get the plaques engraved, which gives him/her time to do the data entry.

Even in the notorious 14-hour ballot count of 1991, it only actually took us two hours to count the 2,107 ballots -- the other twelve hours were spent validating them.

I was NASFiC site selection administrator in 1992 when we had the four-way race for the 1995 NASFiC and had to go to the third round to determine the winner. Even then, I think it might have taken us maybe 90 minutes or so (I forget the exact time) to do the counting, and I was able to announce the results during the Masquerade half-time.

Re: Counting IRV Ballots

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Acknowledging that site selection is counted under different circumstances than Hugos, I find it interesting to note that when I was doing it, we generally validated the ballots before counting them. The exception came at the very end, when late-arriving ballots were trickling in. This was very exciting in 1993, when we had three nail-biting finishers. I added the ballots to the database to see what would happen, but we did have a certain amount of "if these ballots are valid, we have this winner, but if they aren't, we have that winner."

I found data entry very fast. What took longer was checking it for typos. These were pleasingly rare. Having two people do entry for the same set of ballots was a good first check for this.

Re: Counting IRV Ballots

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

...when I was doing it, we generally validated the ballots before counting them.

So does anyone else who has any sense. The 1991 Worldcon in Chicago (selecting the 1994 Worldcon, race between Louisville and Winnipeg) managed a "critical failure" by failing to validate votes as they were cast. The administrator rather naively thought that validation would be a trivial task "Because we'll use a computer." Most of us in the counting room, especially those of us who program computer databases for a living, were horrified when we heard this.

Even at one minute/ballot, it would have taken nearly a day and a half to actually validate 2,107 ballots. Our initial experience of using the computer for validation suggested that it was going to take even longer than one minute per ballot. We ended up begging the Registrar for the master paper copy of the database by number and splitting the validation job up into three teams. (I just realized that as it took three teams twelve hours, that one ballot/minute figure is about right, since it thus took 36 team-hours to do the validation.)

At the following day's Business Meeting, at the urging of the Committee of Tellers, the Business Meeting passed standing resolution BM-1991-1: "Resolved, That the Business Meeting recommends that all future Worldcons adopt the practice of validating site-selection ballots as they are received, rather than after site-selection balloting closes."

So far, every other Worldcon has managed to avoid this particular failure.