jengod is me, except item 6 is backwards.

I understand that Borda and Condorcet and Australian are "simple", but they don't seem it. They give me a headsche and they aren't transperent (and I took a whole course on hem at college1)

I can understand this. I mean, these systems are devised to be fair, to avoid certain distortions, and they do so by creating mathematical formulae that are not everyone's cup of tea.

But seriously, all a user needs to know is what they do to register a vote, and then what it does in principle. For instance, I'd describe the Australian system thus:

1. Each voter ranks all the candidates in order of preference.
2. The system works out the two most popular candidates, and then finds which one of them most voters prefer. That candidate wins.

Yes, the maths is more complicated than that. But to the user, that's not such an issue. All the maths talk is so much geekery (which is why I've been doing it, of course). For anyone else, I think the above is all that's needed to understand it.

7.) If there are more than three choices regarding any particular issue (thread titles come to mind), a [fill in blank] of votes wins the day.

(If we stay with the three day voting period, this makes sense. Otherwise, we're going to be having about a billion ballots before we get to a thread name, etc.)

Can you think of an example where it wouldn't be possible? I can't think of anything we've decided recently that was more than a "should we do this?" question.

Unfortunately, yes. Spoiler policy for Buffy and Angel cross pollination. Some people wanted 1 week, some the weekend, some 2 weeks, some "until the next show". What we could do is hope to hash that out in discussion and just vote for one choice, Only problem with that is that it might knock mentioning the policy out for 6 months--then we could vote again, except by that time Buffy is cancelled.

It was for your own protection.

Don't say I didn't pretend I was civil.

I've got two months of TKD and a big trash-talking maw. Bring it.

Okay, how about TWO deathmatches.

Two-item ballots:

1.) Simple majority
2.) Two-thirds majority

Three-plus item ballots:

1.) Plurality
2.) 50%+1

Can you think of an example where it wouldn't be possible? I can't think of anything we've decided recently that was more than a "should we do this?" question.

Voter turnout was one such item mentioned: if we come to set an actual number, we may want more options than just 0 or 50 (for instance).

I recall a few discussions around here where more than two options have been proposed. This is one of them, for instance. But yes, to bleed some of the importance out of it, I would expect that most of the votes we take will be simple yes/no questions, and for those all the voting systems really boil down to the same thing.

The reasons I support voting are that it will be easier to have a time limited discussion and even if people are upset by an outcome, they can CLEARLY SEE that they were outnumbered. This is why I think we have to work very hard to keep every vote understandable and as free of bureacratize as possible AND to keep the results transparent to math-phobes.

wants to kiss Sophia and buy her chocolate

Some people wanted 1 week, some the weekend, some 2 weeks, some "until the next show".

I think that 1 week, the weekend, and "until the next show" were pretty much equivalent. People clarified "until the next show" to mean "until when the next show ought to be," which is equivalent to one week. The way I'd see it working would be, someone could propose that it get changed to one week. It gets discussed, a lot of people think that's too short a time, and gets voted down. Then, someone could propose two weeks, and we could discuss the pros and cons of that without having to deal with trying to figure out the time frame at the same time as trying to figure out whether we want it changed at all.

edit:

Voter turnout was one such item mentioned: if we come to set an actual number, we may want more options than just 0 or 50 (for instance).

I mentioned that in my original post as something that could be decided later if we end up needing to decide it. I don't really see why we need to decide on how we'll choose a number if we don't know yet that we're going to need to choose a number anyway.

Also, for the imaginary future ballot we figure this out on... Quorum, defined as the number of vote (not voters) necessary to make a ballot valid, is:

1.) 10
2.) 25
3.) 50
4.) 100
5.) Abstain
6.) Write-in #: X

edit: sorry! was doing some self-editing, to keep things simple! 7) 8) were 5) 6)