Cast your vote for the Fedora 10 Codename!

[Nigel Jones]

Tim Jackson wrote:
> Josh Boyer wrote (to a bad address copied from a bad address in my 
> original mail):
>
>> Just vote 0 for all of them.
>
> If I understand the voting system correctly, that's not equivalent 
> because it means "no opinion" not "none of the above" or "none" [1]. I 
> think under the current system with no quorum that if (hypothetically) 
> everyone except one person wanted "none" and thus voted zero for 
> everything, if one person voted "1" for "Stupidname" then "Stupidname" 
> would win regardless of the clear contrary opinion of the majority.
Just a clarification to this statement, the voting form states:

"Fedora Project has implemented Range Voting for this election, in 
particular the "Range (score-summing, blanks treated as zero score, no 
quorum rule)" range voting system.

To cast your vote in this election simply select a value between 0 and 9 
with 0 as 'least or no preference' and 9 as 'highest preference'.

At the end of the election, the highest ranking candidate(s) are marked 
as the winners."

This means:
* There is no need for a 'No Opinion' option
 - "No Opinion" options are only useful for elections using 'averaging', 
where it basically acts as an abstain.  An Averaging variation of Range 
Voting would add all the numerical 'scores' for a candidate, and then 
divide by number of non-no opinion voters, it'd then have to (from 
memory) reach a quorum of x% of the maximum possible vote (this is 
debated because there are SO MANY different variations)...
 - As such, use 0 to facilitate a blank ballot/no opinion
* It is possible to fill in the form with all zero's
 - However this will have little/no effect, except to say in the end of 
ballot that x voted with x including yourself (useful in a way to show 
the number of people interested in voting)
* There is a small mistake in the text
 - highest 'ranking' candidate(s) should read highest 'scoring' 
candidates (this is fixed in my working copy.

As an extra note, the CFRV, while a useful resource is quite bias to a 
variation of Range Voting which we don't use, it's particularly focused 
around promoting Range Voting as a decent format for a presidential 
election (that's my take anyway).

On a side note, there are other forms of voting similar to Range Voting, 
that form a (in my opinion) much fairer system, one I can think of off 
the top of my head, is STV, while complicated it does work and is quite 
effective for single horse and multiple horse races.

- Nigel
Fedora Elections Guru