Sorry, but I think we need to think again about our voting system for the board elections. Condorcet is great for a single-winner election. However AFAICT the current system for the multi-winner board elections has a very undesirable majority-takes-all property.
I couldn't find a formal description of the process we use but as I understand it, we use Condorcet to elect the first seat. Then we remove the winner from the ballots and rerun Condorcet to elect the 2nd winner, etc. If we imagine a polarised election, where there are four candidates on one side A B C D and three candidates on the other side W X Y Z, and three seats, and every ballot is either an ABCD-ballot (ranks every ABCD above every WXYZ) or an WXYZ-ballot (ranks every WXYZ above every ABCD) then a bare majority of ABCDs over WXYZs will get all three of their candidates elected. This would be quite unfair; a better result would be to elect two of A B C D and two of W X Y Z. In less polarised elections we still have the problem that we get a slate of winners who are very similar to each other. In the extreme case, if the winning candidate had n identical twins, they would all win, excluding anyone else. Surely this can't be what we want. We Would rather have diversity, with minority viewpoints represented. I don't have a clear suggestion for an improvement to Condorcet to fix this problem. I did a bit of searching for multi-winner Condorcet and it seems to be an open research problem. I think therefore that we should probably hold the next board elections using STV, which is an established and relatively hard-to-game system which copes well with multiple-winner elections. Ian. _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general
