And this seems in conflict with the spirit (although it may fall within the letter) of chosing simple majority. But maybe that's me. Doesn't it, though?

Can we talk about this for a second? I'm against preferential voting. Even though there are obvious advantages to doing it.

There is, however, a large disadvantage and I'm just going to keep pointing this out. It's more complicated. Buffistas are not going to be comfortable with complicated, mathy, bureaucratic solutions to what are - in essence - basic administrative details. There are a number of unlikely scenarios where simple majority will be insufficient. There are fine issues of fairness intrinsic to the way the vote is structured.

But simple majority is Good Enough. I am a big proponent of Good Enough. It's a whole philosophy of parenting that involves not stressing about whether little Willow is on the Harvard waiting list before third grade. You keep the kid alive, love them and give them some boundaries. Everything else is gravy.

I want to push for people keeping Good Enough in mind. At any point where we can make it simpler - that is a huge positive value for this community. To misapply Occam's Razor, the simplest solution is the one that is most likely going to be the right one for us.

I think we need to establish a few more basic procedural elements: (a) minimum voter turnout(b) separate board for vote discussions (c) if we do the separate board, what process opens that board (Seconding) (d) closing discussions, time limits.

I am very mindful that people want a few things settled to make the board run better. We are going to have problems if this gets too complicated. I think there will be serious issues of resistance and some feeling to scrap it all. I am arguing for those few things that we need settled to be simple and somewhat intuitive. That I am willing to sacrifice a sophisticated processes that guarantee greater fairness, or expressing the true will of the voter, as long as the process is mostly fair, and will be Good Enough.

If we don't keep it simple, we're going to wind up with nothing at all.

To be honest, I did vote for a simple majority. Sure, we have to work out a tiebreaker, but I was voting AGAINST stuff like this.

Yikes.

Uh-huh. Yes. I agree. Word. Hell yeah. Wrod. Listen to the man. Preach it, brother. Amen! Yep. Boy howdy. True dat. And, to sum up, what Hec said.

!!!

If I rank Whedon as preference number 1, he gets what? Like 3 points. If I rank Kafka second he gets 2 points. If I rank monkey third, he gets a point.

There are no points in this system.

There are only votes.

Whedon as preference number one means "a vote for Whedon in the first, and hopefully only, round of counting, where that math is still within John H's grasp".

A vote for Kafka as two means "oh really? Whedon might not win? What's wrong with you people? But if it comes to that, I vote for Monkey in the second round of counting".

Jon, I think your example was probably clear. I don't have a head for this stuff, so although the first time I read it, I got it, by the time I got to this point in the thread, I was confused again. Also, I'm really resisting the idea, so I'm probably accidentally filtering out the sense in the explanation. I get it now though.

Preference comes in when there's not a 50%+1 majority. This makes me want to cry though, because I never would have worded the proposal that way if I knew it was going to open up all of this. That's not your fault. It's mine. Thank you for your patience. In another couple of hours, I'll probably ask you to explain it again. ;)

But simple majority is Good Enough. I am a big proponent of Good Enough.

By "simple majority" do you mean plurality? So if we have six choices for votor turnout numbers and the top vote getter receives 20% of the vote, that's good enough? I respectfully disagree. I think we'd want a runoff, and I'm trying to save time and keep things simple by asking folks to vote preferentially.

Hec, are you in favour of runoffs where there's no Simple Maj?

I'm not sure I get your position.

Or are you saying not even Simple Maj, just "greatest number of votes"?

What Hec and ita said.

Preference comes in when there's not a 50%+1 majority.

See, I think the solution to this is always having yes/no votes. That is, I almost think we should hash out a consensus for, say a number needed to second HERE.

THEN we vote yes or no on it.

Also, i think we should post that we're discussing this in press, even though the actual vote isn't set yet. It is going to take us a long time to come up with something to vote on, and if we wait unti we have solidified it to post the discussion, we will then have to have 3 more days of discussion before we can vote.

I think we have a huge problem if we've got people who voted for the phrase "Simple Majority" and didn't understand that it meant "more than half".

If they thought it meant "greatest number of votes" then I don't know what to do with the results.