You don’t need negative votes to express concerns in a multiple choice election. This is how real-world elections work as well.
Instead, you can just express the concerns without casting votes, and if those concerns are agreed on, the problematic choice can be removed, or the entire voting is called off. This is what -1 actually means in Apache Voting Process anyway, except the system is designed for an approval context, and the only choice being removed always results in the process being called off. Of course, we can still “allow” -1 but keep the meaning as “please remove this choice.” But IMO that would be even more confusing (since negative votes would work differently from positive votes). TP > On 23 Oct 2025, at 11:49, Kiruban Kamaraj <[email protected]> wrote: > > IMHO, if we don't let people vote -1, how are devs supposed to raise > legitimate concerns about an option? If someone votes -1, they should > explain why - and hopefully devs are only doing this when they have real > concerns, not just to push their favorite choice. If you have a solid > reason to oppose something, just vote -1. If you don't care about another > option either way, then don't vote on it. > > I agree with what Jerek said. > > *it's not "who wins" but "which option wins". I don't absolutely care who* > *"wins" here, but which option has the most support.* > > On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 2:55 AM Daniel Standish via dev < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> The DAG terminology vote I think has surfaced a problem with our multiple >> choice voting procedure. >> >> If you allow people to vote for multiple options, they seem to tend to use >> it in a manner to signify their ranked preference. However, this could >> easily result in an option that doesn't have majority preference getting >> the win. >> >> E.g. suppose 4 people vote for option A, and 5 people vote for option B +1 >> but also +0.5 for A. Then option A will win even though people prefer >> option B 5 to 4. >> >> This is a bad outcome. >> >> It gets even stranger if you allow negative votes. Then you end >> essentially invalidating other peoples votes, unless *everyone* minuses all >> of the options they don't favor. And even if everyone does that, then it's >> hard to see how that gets to the outcome favored by most. >> >> With ranked choice voting, everyone votes for their most favored choice, >> but they can also rank all the options. If their most favored option does >> not win, then their vote goes to their second favored option, and so on. >> >> This is a better way to do this. >> >> I propose that when doing multiple choice votes, we do ranked choice, >> instead of allowing people to just vote for multiple options with plus or >> minus votes. >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
