The final vote: jengod "Sunnydale Press" Mar 3, 2003 12:00:27 am EST

jengod and Sophia and all of you - I hope somebody says it better in a few posts so that I can just 'wrod' them, but in the meantime, just my humble thanks for all your work, and my hopes that I'll be more available in the future to help. You very much rock.

[Edit: Everything could be mathier. But in a fun way.]

A quick stab at the next round of decisions (after which most of this stuff will be over)

1. Do we want a separate thread for actual voting discussions?

2. Do we want to close the talking about a subject when the voting starts?

3. How many Buffistas does it take to make a vote count? Do abstentions count toward this?

4. Do we have some way of deciding what we vote on? Do we need "seconds"? Obviously not everything needs to be voted on!

edited to reflect ita's and Jon's suggestion.

2. Do we want to close the talking about a subject after the voting starts?

I recommend this language be changed to "Do we want to close the talking about a subject when the voting starts?"

Sophia's Four Points look good to me.

Thanks so much for receiving the votes and tabulating and everything, jengod!

I'm all excited because of how many people voted. I just think it's great. I'm also glad that there were so few weekend voters, because I did wonder about peoples' access. I guess weekend-access people are also evening-access people, generally.

I'll edit, ita.

Nice summary, Sophia. There was also the issue of whether abstentions count towards #3.

And to avoid a runoff ballot, I would like to suggest again that we use a preferential ballot to determine the number of Buffistas needed to make a vote count (a.k.a. "the quorum"). Yes, it's mathy. But it's also the system used by the government of Australia as well as Cambridge, MA. If it's good enough for them, it should be good enough for us. It will save us time. And if the vote counters are intimidated by it, I volunteer to add the votes and post detailed results.

Edited, Jon.

Jon, could you point me to some good explanations of the differences in vote counting systems? I can deal with the basic yes/no and I know about proportional representation, but I'm not sure exactly what's different about a preferential ballot. (You may have explained this before. I have skimmed. If that's the case, I'm sorry to bother you but a post number would be really helpful.)

I think preferential is when you rank the choices from most preferred to least preferred, rather than a straight yes/no. The winner is then sort of the one the most people rank the most highly.

I think it's too complicated for our purposes -- I normally know what I like and what I don't like, but I don't really differentiate between my 3rd and 4th favorites out of a field of 5. But I can see the argument that it makes the outcome more accurately reflect the vox populi.