To speak precisely, if you discard the Cheese votes for Cheese, and it turns out the Cheese voters all preferred Kafka, then the root emotional reaction is "Wait! Monkey was winning, and then Kafka got a majority! How can this be? This isn't what I meant at all!"

I was a math major. I can understand this stuff. But I think it's an unreasonably high barrier to entry, and had I known I was opening the door to this with my pro-vote pro-"simple majority" vote, I'd have voted differently.

(Technically, no majors, but I did do a year of advanced stats, and, believe it or not, logic)

ITA w/ita.

But if there were a runoff, Kafka would have won anyway. We're just saving time by having an "instant runoff". t /peeking in

I do understand the preferential system. I don't think it's *that* complicated, but I do think that it's too complicated for the kind of decisions that are going to be taken here. Plus, with the preferential system, there's always the risk that the final winner would be a counterintuitive one, and each votation will be followed by days of explanation of "31% of the people who chose A chose B as second option, but only 17% of people who chose D picked B...".

The way I see it, if Monkey wins by 34% and the other thread names get only 33'9% each... then tough. People should just be aware of that posibility when voting in a multiple-choice election, so that they don't get too upset when something like that happens.

But if there were a runoff, Kafka would have won anyway. We're just saving time by having an "instant runoff".

That's how I've always understood the Aiuistriailiaianiiii system. Anyway, I suspect that all this dreaded mathiness isn't actually necessary for the (possibly mythical) People Who Don't Read Bureaucracy. If we go this way, and we put up a ballot that says "rank your preferences, with '1' being your first choice and '2' being your second choice...." people can and will understand it. I don't think it's at all complex, in terms of what we're asking people to vote on. (Obviously, it's considerably more complex for those of us who have chosen to play in this discussion, but that's part of making that choice.)

I'm changing my post.

You rank in terms of what you like.

If you like Monkey, Cheese, Kafka you rank it like that.

If Monkey looks like it might win and it's a tie and then Cheese pulls ahead that means more people who ranked Kafka first ranked Cheese second. So Monkey wasn't their first OR second choice.

(Did I get that right again?)

So it really is the majority winning because it's based on preference. First, second, third.

Voting preferentially is easy. Scoring preferentially is easy for those as does it. Explaining the scoring before and afterwards is not. So I dislike it.

Also because I just don't understand what we're voting on that needs to be this granular. Not with all the time I fear will be lost to education.

Speaking just for myself, I am strongly against using any system here where the math can't be easily explained. I'm gonna want to know how the votes are counted.

I will post a detailed round-by-round summary of the balloting.

Honestly, I thought we were only going to use this voting system thing for pro/anti type issues, not things where we'd need to rank multiple optons. I thought that we explicitly excluded thread-naming for that very reason.

But we've got two questions proposed on this next ballot that lend themselves to multiple options. That's all I've proposed. Let's do it for this next ballot.

I'm surprised, though, that a vote with 49%, 10%, 10%, 10%, 11% doesn't pass muster for option #1 to win.

In all likelyhood, it would win, since it's unlikely that 2% of the other choices wouldn't pick #1 in subsequent rounds. But we didn't know that #1 would get 49% going in.

Remember: For questions where there are only two choices, this entire discussion is irrelevent.

This whole discussion comes down to how much you try to get everyone what they want, doesn't it?

The preferences thing is a very fine-grained way of getting most people what they mostly want.

If you accept that votes can be won on one vote, and if you accept that 35 votes beats 34 votes and it's over, then yeah, that's a very simple system that everyone can use without hesitation or explanation.

But that system leaves you with 69 people, 34 of whom are unhappy with the outcome.

I've come to see the Preferential thing, ironically, as like achieving consensus. A kind of mathematically-arrived-at consensus.

But that way you may end up with a whole lot of people getting not what they want, but what they begrudgingly accept as the lesser of two evils; most people mostly happy, considering the alternatives. It's not sexy, is it?

[And sorry if anyone thought the tables were patronising. I like stuff like that myself.]

I have to say, I just scolled the last 200 posts or so, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I do know that I have a headache.

When I voted for simple majority, I assumed I was voting for "most votes wins." Preferential voting confuses me. I understand it, but it somehow still confuses me. And it makes things much more complicated than they need to be.

Simple solution. Take one vote right now. Should simple majority be most votes wins, or does the winning option have to have a higher percentage of votes than the losing options combined.