Format of committee elections

[Teasel]

Now that the election of chair is well underway, I was wondering whether any more thought had been given to how we elect the rest of the committee (forgive me if this has already been posted and I've just missed it!)

There are countless options

One vote per team, top 5 candidates get places
Five votes per team, top 5 candidates get places
Single transferrable vote
One vote per team, top candidate gets on, repeat four times
Something else


Has the voting process already been decided, or is it something we need to decide upon soon?

[Admin]

Fairest seems to be "One vote per team, top candidate gets on, repeat four times".

A little drawn out but it does seem fairest.

Each round only needs to run for 2 weeks, say Wednesday to Wednesday".

[Pharisee]

Forgive me for asking but how do you propose to differentiate between 'One vote per team' and 'one vote per GAGB member'?

[MCL]

Originally posted by Pharisee@Aug 21 2003, 11:13 PM
Forgive me for asking but how do you propose to differentiate between 'One vote per team' and 'one vote per GAGB member'?
presumably they wil use age and treachery.

[Admin]

Originally posted by Pharisee@Aug 21 2003, 10:13 PM
Forgive me for asking but how do you propose to differentiate between 'One vote per team' and 'one vote per GAGB member'?
I guess it should have read "one vote per GAGB member" because voting relies on the fact that each "member" can only vote once.

Agreed that it might not be perfect, but better than some other methods.

Again, it's a case of best endeavours.

[Omally]

I agree with the idea of "One Member, One Vote". Sounds, well, sound enough to me. :)
Yeah, it may be a little dragged out but seems better than most to me.

[NattyBooshka]

Reading this belatedly... but once the committee draw up a constitution, this could be a good place to start. A lot of us are teams... but if we only have one membership here we have one vote. Therefore I suggest that we define "member" as the person on a team who is the one who's the loudmouth... err... I mean who does the typing on here, and "associate-member" as all other members of that team. Only a full member would then get a vote, and as this would be stated in the constitution, teams would have the choice of having an ID each if they wanted "full" privilages or just the one if the rest of the team were happy to be seen as "associates"

Neil.

[Teasel]

Well, while Jayne and I cache together at weekends, our weekday caching habits are very different because of our different jobs (Jayne works part time, so caches in the afternoon; I often travel down to Bracknell for meetings, so I do lots of night caching around that area). We therefore log our finds under different IDs. Should the our family really get twice as many votes as families who log and post under a single ID?

One person one vote, one team one vote, or one household one vote? All have advantages and disadvantages, but I'm undecided which I think is best.

What I do think could be improved is the actual mechanics of the election itself. We don't know yet how long a committee member's term is going to be, nor indeed how many by-elections we can expect. But twelve whole weeks does seem rather a long time to elect a committee. Taking into account time for nominations and such, that's nearly 4 months per election! Something which only requires one round of voting (well, two including the chairman vote) would seem more convenient.

Personally I'd favour a single transferrable vote (select your top five preferences; at counting time everyone's top preference selects the first winner; those who voted for the winner have their second choice added in; the new top person is voted in and anyone who voted for them gets their next choice added in and so on). But a straightforward "five votes per voter" could also work well.

[paul.blitz]

Originally posted by Teasel@Sep 10 2003, 05:50 PM
Personally I'd favour a single transferrable vote (select your top five preferences; at counting time everyone's top preference selects the first winner; those who voted for the winner have their second choice added in; the new top person is voted in and anyone who voted for them gets their next choice added in and so on).
Ummm... a couple of comments: if everyone who has voted for the winner gets their vote re-distributed, then that is NOT STV!!! It is multiple votes!

The way STV worked when I was at university was:

1) irrelevant of the # of candidates & # of posts, you put as many or as few candidates in order of preference on your voting slip

2) person with LOWEST number of votes has their votes re-distributed to next on voting slips (if no "next choice" then vote is discarded).

3) repeat #2 until you have reduced # candidates to the number of posts

Thus, you have a single vote, which gets transferred as candidates get eliminated.


I agree though, we need to select a "one-stop voting" setup... as it stands, if we assumed that *I* was never elected, then given that I vote for myself every time, my vote is a bit wasted.... Ok, maybe we should insist that candidates may not vote for themselves (not such a silly idea).

Your idea of simply having X votes seems nice and simple too.

Anyway, something for the new committee to work on!

[Paul G0TLG]

It's also about the mechanics of it...I suspect that the polling mechanism on the board is restricted to the simplicity we currently have (I'm the admin of another board run under Invision, and I haven't found any way to have anything other than the current "one member one vote" polls. That said, I haven't looked very hard).

Having said that, if we can make it happen I agree that giving each member up to five votes, and picking the top five candidates, would be the best way to do it.

Paul

[NattyBooshka]

I suppose that you could run 5 polls at the same time... then add up the votes.

Of course, somebody could vote for the same person 5 times... but assuming we were responsible it would work as you'd be not voting for your other 4 "favourites" if you did this.