2009/2/24 Thomas Lord <[email protected]>: > It's sort of funny that all of the > information that goes into the results > of the election has been available for > a while now yet nobody has bothered > to both run the program to find the outcome > and posted about it, even if unofficially.
Well actually, I did run it, but more for experimental purposes as I am engaged in a side debate over voting systems :) I noticed at least one odd anomaly in the three-seat case (for our ballots) that takes a bit more space to elucidate than I really felt like writing up. But since you asked... If you follow the process of the count through the transcript that Alan's code provides, you will notice that Marc Feeley is elected outright with a full quota on the first round. Will Clinger came in second by the number of first-preference votes *but* Jonathan Rees turns out to be the second one elected on transfers. And in fact, Clinger leads for second place right up until Anton Vanstraaten is eliminated, electing Rees on the penultimate round. At this point, one may well ask, "So what? Isn't that the way it's supposed to work?", and indeed that's just fine, until you start looking at other sizes of the SC (which I was doing because I was curious about who might be on an expanded SC). So just for grins, I ran a two-seat election, theorizing that perhaps Feeley/Rees should be the result based on interpreting the previous count. I was wrong. Feeley was still the first elected, but not until the fifth round. And Clinger filled the second seat, leading all the way. There is a sensitivity to the number of seats (and consequently the initial quotas) in the counting algorithm that I found moderately surprising. And after running all the elections up to seven seats, each larger elected set was a proper superset of the immediately preceding, smaller election, so I suppose you could say that the ballots and the algorithm determine a total ordering of the candidates by the community, but it seems less psychologically true than mathematically true. Also I would have to wonder how much people's conception of the committee size affected their votes *and* how much the short ballots (and there were a few that did not rank all the candidates) affected the outcome. My conclusion: that my interlocutor who has been badgering me about Restricted Range Voting has a point. There are some pathologies in STV, and we may actually have seen them (e.g. partisan voting effects in the Rees/Clinger count-off) in this election. And for the terminally curious (but lazy :) here are the results for all the election counts I ran. The names are in the order that the members are chosen by the counting process. 2 seats: (feeley clinger) 3 seats: (feeley rees clinger) 4 seats: (feeley clinger shivers rees) 5 seats: (feeley shivers clinger rees hanson) 6 seats: (feeley rees clinger shivers hanson vanstraaten) 7 seats: (feeley clinger rees shivers hanson vanstraaten dybvig) Raw code: http://www.r6rs.org/steering-committee/election/pr.scm Raw data: http://www.r6rs.org/steering-committee/election/preliminary-ballots.scm david rush -- GPG Public key at http://cyber-rush.org/drr/gpg-public-key.txt _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
