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Debian goes to the pollsDebian goes to the pollsPosted Dec 17, 2008 18:42 UTC (Wed) by alonz (subscriber, #815)Parent article: Debian goes to the polls I believe there is another way in which this vote could be considered "rigged": the "DFSG purist" vote is concentrated in a single option, while the "practical" vote is split in 5 options. This almost certainly prevents even a simple majority for any of the options allowing non-free firmware (and obviously ensures any "supermajority" will be unachievable), even if the actual number of supporters for these options is far larger than the number of "purists".
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Concentration Posted Dec 17, 2008 18:52 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] That is a thought which had occurred to me. My understanding of the Condorcet voting mechanism (fuzzier than it should be) is, though, that it makes it harder to truly split a vote in this manner. It seems like less of an issue than it would be in a more straightforward, first-past-the-post system.I think.
Concentration Posted Dec 17, 2008 19:59 UTC (Wed) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] How do you calculate a supermajority in a Condorcet vote? Does it require a 3:1 margin over all of the other possibilities? If there are 3 roughly equivalent options, it seems likely to me that people who like one of them will like all of them, and thus will have them all ranked at the top, in a roughly random distribution. None of these options would then have a supermajority over any of the others.Ah, I've answered my own question by reading the Debian constitution. The "further discussion" choice is considered to be the default option, and any proposals with supermajority requirements must have a supermajority relative to that option. That's a reasonably sensible way of handling it.
Condorcet prevents splitting like that Posted Dec 17, 2008 19:59 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]
Any Condorcet voting system prevents that kind of splitting. In all cases, people will rank their preferences.
That said, the options themselves appear confusing to me, and that's a real problem. No voting system can work well if the voters have significantly different understandings of what the vote means.
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