Awkward Voting

Awkward Voting

Posted Mar 13, 2003 22:15 UTC (Thu) by gleef (guest, #1004)
Parent article: Choosing a ternary operator for Python

With such an awkward voting scheme, it's no wonder they have no clear winner. To select between so many choices, Condorcet voting becomes almost a necessity. I'm not a python developer, but I would suggest that they may actually get an answer to their question if they rerun the vote as follows:

1. Add any significant write-in's from the first vote to the list
2. Add "No Tertiary Operator" to the list of choices
3. Remove "Write In Vote" from the list, there are enough choices
4. Have every voter submit a fully ranked ballot. Nothing fancy, just rank all the choices (including "No Tertiary Operator") in order of preference. If there are 18 choices, there should be 18 rankings for each ballot
5. Process those ballots using the Condorcet rules (or one of the widely accepted variations, which only really differ in the method for resolving "circular ties", a very rare occurance).

The result will be a fair indication of the most preferred choice. This voting scheme is not significantly harder on the voters. As for the counters, it's annoying to count lots of these ballots by hand, but we have computers that make it simple.

For more information on the Condorcet Voting system, see The Election Methods Site. For an example of an organization happily using Condorcet for real life decision making see Debian. The system's not perfect, but it's fair and comes up with a good indicator of a preferred compromise choice from a list of many choices.

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