If Jon B or anyone else is happy to code PHP that keeps saying "nuh-uh, try again, bozo" then that problem will be solved, but it'll be a pain.

I've been thinking about that very issue. I don't think it will be a pain to code, and I'm happy to do it.

So you'd rank them 6 8 4 10 2 0? (I assume you'd still rather have 2 than 0, after all.) Then you can vote for 10, knowing that if enough people like 6-or-fewer, it'll win; if not, it'll go up to 8, and if not, it'll go all the way to 10. (And if 4 winds, then over half of the people don't like any option higher than 4, so it doesn't matter if you prefered 6, 8, or 10).

I really think this works for both seconding and voter turnout, unless you think anyone would prefer, in order, 6-2-4, or (for turnout), 50-20-30.

I don't think it will be a pain to code, and I'm happy to do it.

Cool. So you'd go with drop menus? And validate that each one had a unique value in it?

You could validate with JavaScript of course, but you'd have to do it again, server-side, just in case. I'll help with JavaScript if needed.

Then you can vote for 10, knowing that if enough people like 6-or-fewer, it'll win; if not, it'll go up to 8, and if not, it'll go all the way to 10.

But what if everyone thinks this way? 10 wins even though everyone wanted 6.

The beauty of the Australian method of preferential balloting is that (Gar's extreme example aside) you don't have to strategize your vote. You vote for what you want. If it has the lowest number of votes, then your vote goes to your second choice, and so on.

As much as this whole process pains me (why did we vote for voting, why? the system was not broken! t /rant ), I wonder if we need two different abstention options -- one for "Neither of these options is good for me, we really need to talk more" and one for "I'd be happy with either, I just really like voting." Because I see a major difference between the two, and there's no way to distinguish them in our current ballot.

Cool. So you'd go with drop menus? And validate that each one had a unique value in it?

Yeah, something lke that. Let's take this offline or to BBaBB if you want to toss around ideas.

Oh, but technical questions aside, there are constitutional questions -- do we force people to assign a preference to each option? Or do we validate simply that they haven't assigned things illogically as in the case of the "first, second, second, fourth" vote?

OK, Jon's right. My "vote for the highest you like" idea only works if you figure most people have a "this high, but no higher" limit in mind, and not if people want "at least this many, but I'd be willing to go all the way up from this."

Sorry...

do we force people to assign a preference to each option?

My opinion? At first, I was thinking that we should force people to rank all the choices. But now I'm thinking that, if we allow folks to abstain on a question, why not allow them to effectively abstain if their first X choices are eliminated. Personally, I think that if you have an opinion on what number of "seconds" is best, you should want to rank all the choices, but we shouldn't force people to do it.

it's called a simple majority because it's simple!

I must admit that, despite being "Austrailian" as people love to spell it, I don't quite understand the system as well as I might.

Say we have a vote. A hundred people vote. Option 1: (All New Threads Should Contain The Word 'Monkey') gets 97 votes.

There's no need to get Australian on our asses there is there?

The system only comes into play when there is no clear majority?

It's only mathy when it needs to be mathy. It's a mathy way of solving the kind of problem where 30% of people wanted one thing and 30% wanted another and 30% wanted the third option.

In those cases, you sift the votes again and you say "despite the fact that only 30% voted Monkey as a primary vote, there were another 60% who assigned it their secondary vote". So Monkey wins because 60% of people admitted they could live with it if it had to happen. And that prevents us from having to do another runoff.

I'm sure I'm wrong about the figures, but am I right about the principle?