Please, omnis, tell us more about this "instant run-off voting."
F2F 4: Too Much Candy, Never Enough Mojitos.
Plan what to do, what to wear (you can never go wrong with a corset), and get ready for the next BuffistaCon: Madison, WI from June 20-22 2008! Official website.
oops, that's what I get for looking over the sand-bags.
In all honesty, I can barely give you the concept of it. It is something the local Green Party has been pushing for elections. It saves candidates money. Saves the localities money. And it gets you an elected official in half the time, and reduces voter fatigue.
In a nutshell, rather than casting A vote. You cast a ranking vote. Of choices A-F, I prefer choice B, so that gets my #1 vote, and Choice C is my 2nd choice, and choice F my 3rd. Then, when you tally the votes, first you look to see if there is a clear winner. If not, you look to the 2nd choices... and so on down the line. It is at this point (or just slightly before it) that I go "huh?". Sounds good in theory, but I don't have the math formulas infront of me to see how it works. Not sure it would work in here. It certainly would make tallying the vote harder.
For more info, here is the link to Wiki: [link]
It is something the local Green Party has been pushing for elections.
Aha! A communist plot.
I'm teasing, omnis. We had a HUGE HUGE discussion and fight about preferential voting when we were establishing the board's voting structure.
People still get twitchy when the subject comes up.
oops, did I shoot the sacred elephant? Damn. Eh, lucky I'm part of the Communist plot, so religion is not needed ;-)
It would be a lot harder to implement. While it has advantages, it's not perfect. And since I am such a junior member of this lovely board, I am not going to push it AT ALL. Just leave it at the suggestion above, and duck from oncoming bullets. Hate for my red blood to spill... wait, I'm Green. Wait. Does that make me Vulcan (having green blood). Wait! Now I'm confused. /natter.
No worries, omnis. It cracks me up every time it comes up.
oops, did I shoot the sacred elephant? Damn
No worries, omnis. It cracks me up every time it comes up.
Well, it has its merits. That's why it keeps coming up.
Of course, "preferential voting" is really a vague term. There are several systems of vote counting that'll let people vote rank their choices, rather than just choosing one. (I TAed Math and Politics a few times. There were five or six of these methods that we taught. Plus Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which is always a fun one to explain to undergrads -- it shows that it's impossible to design a voting system that satisfies every criterion in a particular list of rather reasonable-seeming criteria. The proof loops through several proofs by contradiction -- it's kind of neat, actually.)
t edit: didn't mean to get all lectury. It's been a long day.
Despite all my talk of Chicago I just realized that I think every F2F should be in a new venue. I would happily visit KC or Minneapolis. I've never been to either place.
I just loved the Highland Inn in Atlanta, btw, which while it wasn't shiny or modern or de-luxe, was quirky and clean and very accommodating....
My only, only dislike at Highland Inn was that the hospitality suite being divided into two rooms made it cramped and difficult for a lot of people to be in the same room at once. I found it uncomfortable. Of course, I like hospitality suites to have king-size beds in them, too. *shrug*
It was a bit small, but I was just thinking yesterday how convenient it was to have two rooms (we had two rooms in SF, also, iirc) so we could sometimes have vids in one room and socializing in the other (and drifting back and forth between them) without the either group disrupting the other. Why this occurred to me I don't know.