Perhaps Denise is right. Perhaps we need to ask people in a simple question, whether they want votes tallied under the preferential method, or the most votes wins method.

People are using a three item ballot question to explain preferential, and show how it "will" determine the option "most" people want or can accept. Fact is, Whedon, monkeys and cheese aside, for issues like how many votes make an election count (I'm never again using the "q" word), it appears that the people who are in favor of the preferential system are also in favor of tossing up about 5 choices to folks.

What if we had this kind of scenario though?

example with a hundred people casting votes on an issue:

hypothetical issue = How many voters make an election count:

010: 25 people rank it #1, 15 rank it #2

025: 15 people rank it #1, 25 rank it #2

050: 00 people rank it #1, 30 rank it #2

075: 30 people rank it #1, 00 rank it #2

090: 14 people rank it #1, 26 rank it #2

100: 26 people rank it #1, 14 rank it #2

Where's the clear will of the people in this, even with preferential voting?

And the numbers I threw up assume everyone voting would participate in the ranking past their number one choice. I wouldn't. I'd just vote for my number one, because in this instance, I believe the minimum should be low, and if my choice ties with another choice, I don't want to give my vote to another choice in the tie-breaker.

Where's the clear will of the people in this, even with preferential voting?

I looks to me like you still don't understand how it works. In your example, you've presented the data in a way that makes it impossible to determine the next round. For one thing, you need to show, within the group of #1 choices, how the second choice votes are split.

I believe the minimum should be low, and if my choice ties with another choice, I don't want to give my vote to another choice in the tie-breaker.

Yep. You still don't get how it works. Later this morning, I will try to write up another example that uses more than three choices.

Perhaps Denise is right. Perhaps we need to ask people in a simple question, whether they want votes tallied under the preferential method, or the most votes wins method.

I am all for this. I can try to write something up for this later as well.

Perhaps, since so many people, it seems, voted with an unclear idea of what the ballot was saying, that specific issue could be voted on once again. So we could see what people had meant to vote.

Did someone say that? I skipped slightly. I'm very tired.

But otherwise I'm shutting up. See this girl? Gone.

Rebecca - as the person who drew it up, I can tell you I only had a two options vote in mind, so there was always going to be a "majority" by any definition. Given that people voted in the simple majority rather than the higher majority, I'm inclined to think there is a chance people don't feel the need for the preferential method.

Please don't shut up. I don't think there's any harm in taking a vote that says, okay - simple majority works when there's only two choices. When there's more than two, there is no guarantee any one item will get 50%+1. Do you just want the item with the most votes to win, or do you want to rank your choices?

Jon, I'm sorry I wasn't more specific. Assume the people whose first choice was a minimum of 10, voted for 25 as their second choice. Assume the people whose first choice for a minimum was 25, voted for 10 as their second choice.

Assume the same relationship between the people who preferred 50 and 75.

Assume the same relationship between the people who preferred 90 and 100.

Yep. You still don't get how it works. Later this morning, I will try to write up another example that uses more than three choices.

Okay. I forgot that the only second choices we'd look at are those of the people whose first choice got eliminated. In this hypothetical, nobody's first choice got eliminated. Hey, it could happen. Where would we go from there?

Now let's tweak only the numbers for the two middle choices, but leave every other total the same (with the same reciprocal relationship as before) Where would we go if 3 people had chosen "50" as their first choice and those same 3 people had chosen "75" as their second choice, and conversely, 27 people had chosen "75" as their first choice and those same 27 people had chosen "50" as their second choice?

If I understand your system, "50" would be eliminated as an option. Fair enough. But looking at their second choices only adds three votes to the total of people who voted for "75" - which still doesn't leave you with a 50%+1 majority in any total. Would we go to the third choices (which I haven't bothered to do). Would the third choices give ANYONE what they really wanted? How would you eliminate any more, based on the second re-sorting?

We vote for mascot. There are three choices -- Monkey, Kafka, and Cheese Man. The first choice results are Monkey-40%; Kafka-35%; Cheese Man-25%. If we weren't voting preferentially, we'd have to have a runoff between Monkey and Kafka. However, since we voted preferentially, the runoff ballot has already been done! We take the ballots of everyone who voted for Cheese Man and resort them based on those ballots second choices. IT'S EXACTLY THE SAME AS A RUNOFF BUT WITHOUT THE EXTRA TIME NECESSARY TO SET UP A WHOLE OTHER BALLOT. thank you.

Your example above assumes that people would want a run-off and wouldn't accept Monkey as the winner. I disagree, and would, even if it were closer, even if instead of percents we were talking actual vote tallies and it was only 39, 38 and 37, I'd want the option that got the 39 votes to win. There seem to be other voices feel the same.

I think the preferential method (despite whether it's just as simple, more simple, more complex) might not actually please or even placate more people. I'm inclined to want "my choice" to win. If "my choice" doesn't win, I frequently don't care what does win. I'm not the only person who has expressed this opinion in the last 200 posts. I'm inclined to think that some of us who feel this way won't continue to contribute to this discussion because part of the reason we feel that way in the first place, is because we like these things to end. Yeah, I wanted Kafka, but it's monkey and I don't give a flying fu..monkey.

Why not do what Denise suggested? Why not ask whether, when there are more than two choices, people would just prefer that whichever has the most votes wins, or if people would prefer the preferential tally?

Jon, I forgot a bunch of stuff.

Say (based on all the numbers before, including the tweaking) all choices but "75" and "100" got eliminated. We'd then take a look at the second choices of all the folks who got eliminated, right?

Well the people who chose either "10" or "25" had second choices that also got eliminated.

"50" is also eliminated. All three people with "50" as their first choice, had "75" as their second choice. This boosts the "75" tally to thirty votes (remember it was tweaked down to 27).

"90" was eliminated. All fourteen people who had "90" as their first choice, chose "100" as their second choice. So their fourteen votes get added to "100" tally, and "100" then has 40 votes.

Then does 100 win? If so, doesn't this seriously discount all the people who voted for 10 and 25. What about all the people who voted for "50" that never would have ranked 100 as anything but last place?

So never mind tabling the discussion for a few days, then?

Sigh.

For what it's worth, I'm also very tired of this. And since I'm not going to elaborate, I know that's not terribly helpful, but there you have it.

Good lord, 257 posts since I last looked in here.

No carpal tunel yet?

Why not ask whether, when there are more than two choices, people would just prefer that whichever has the most votes wins, or if people would prefer the preferential tally?

I think we may have to go back and ask people to clarify how they want voting to work - by a vote. It's clear there are several issues that would still have to be resolved before we started using voting.

But this is also a good example of still talking about it.

Liese is just the most recent person whose fur is standing on end. Ple, bitterchick also have strong objections. Kat, Burrell, ita strong reservations. These are active people in our community. I think poor Sophia is getting burned out trying to keep this on the rails.

I motion that we stop talking about voting and ways to vote and what needs to be done with the vote and how preferential voting works or anything that contains the letters "v-o-t" in that order until next Monday.

I think we might want to address the Angel/Buffy whiteout and crossover issues within the threads themselves. Probably after Angel airs.

OK, now I think we should stop talking about preferential voting and forget it. It's been explained, some people still don't get it and are annoyed by that, other people think it's totally obvious, and are annoyed by the not-getting-it people. Forget it. It's too hard. If we have to have 5 rounds of yes/no voting to get to a decision, so be it.

But I am hearing and feeling "critical irritation mass" coming on. If the point of establishing the voting is to ease friction, then let us keep that in mind now. Because I'm seeing friction. And resentment. The first vote and the consensus around it seems tenuous to me now and I would ask you all to hold on to it...gently. A little time and space might be good here.

Yeah, I agree with this.

I guess what's frustrating to me is that we've been really close for awhile, but every time we seem to reach consensus (for example, I thought we'd agreed to try preferential voting this one time), the discussion goes in circles and gets dragged out some more.

But this is the exact problem! The 5 or 10 people who were around for one set of a couple of hours were coming to a consensus, but then a different 5 or 10 people were around for a different set of a couple of hours, and they didn't agree. This is exactly where we got into trouble -- a bullshit "consensus" of people who were reading the Bureaucracy thread at noon EST (or whatever).

I was with the people who said "stop talking" but then more people talked, so I talked, so sue me.

If we have to go 5 rounds of yes/no voting...

This assumes people wouldn't be happy with the "which ever item got the most votes option".

I completely agree with Jesse about the false sense of consensus.