2009/12/7 John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote If your first choice candidate isn't in the the runoff, you can't vote for
him or her, so you vote for whichever of the remaining candidates you like the best, which, in a reasonable world, would be whichever of them would have ranked higher on your STV ballot. In effect, it's just a slower and less fair way to do the same thing. Note that in STV, if one candidate gets 50% of the votes, the election is over, and the transferrals only happen so long as nobody has a majority.
If as people seem to be saying, our electorate is so innumerate that they cannot ask themselves "who would I vote for if my preferred candidate weren't running?" then I guess we should do something else. But it is a sad commentary on the voters.
In a conference call held to try to explain the issue yesterday (3am on the US east coast) there was a commonly expressed concern that public confidence in the election system was critical, along with a concern that an ordered vote would be hard to explain and thus would not instill said required level of confidence. It's as if each and every voter needs to know the insides of the vote-counting software and algorythms in order to have confidence, and that anything more complex than first-part-the-post will open us to accusations of opacity. No, I don't get it either. It seemed like I was one of the only people on the call supporting a single STV round. I made the point (putting on my RALO Chair hat) that the process of going back to the ALSs -- and possibly from the ALSs to their members -- would be overwhelmed by a manual, multi-round vote. Giving enough time for proper flow of consensus could take weeks per round. I'll leave it to the others who were on the call to defend a multi-round, FPTP scheme, because I certainly can't. Then there were those who, in the name of expediency, promoted "freeing" the voting reps to vote to their personal preferences (rather than be directed by RALO consensus) in order to make multiple rounds go faster. And all this to defend first-past-the-post. Then there was the oft-repeated mantra that "the first vote is from the heart, the second vote is from the head". I guess I'm not sophisticated enough to see why every vote shouldn't also be done with the consent of the small intestine and adrenal gland. Towards the end of the call, the compromise(d) wisdom seemed to coalecse around a "hybrid" approach. While details of the hybrid were evasive, the discussion suggested a first round based on an ordered vote to narrow a large field down to two or three, then one or two FPTP rounds would determine the 50%+1 winner. I find this approach to be condescending to (and distrusful of) the ALSs and ICANN individual At-Large members, but there seemed to be few else involved in the discussion who agreed with me. If pressed I can accept the hybrid voting process as vaguely suggested above, but I still think it's needlessly wasteful of time and resources. - Evan