Representation and democracy

General
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continuing from here:

Positions will be democratically elected, unlike the NixOS Foundation. Ideally this helps resolve problems with representation as a whole.

guaranteeing representation when democratically selecting representatives may work better under proportionally representative voting schemes, such as STV.

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This feels like a continuation of Voting and ensuring integrity. However, we can probably go more in depth about the algorithm of choice here, since I am always curious to see alternate voting algorithms.

I am really curious as to what @Jeff thinks of this algorithm as oppose to the alternate vote. One thing I do agree on no matter what is that we need an algorithm that lets us rate the candidates against each other.

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I think the main difference between STV and alternate vote (which I keep forgetting is instant runoff voting) is that STV works for for multiple candidates due to their being a required threshold for winning.

So in Alternate Vote you go:

  • Tally all votes
  • Eliminate least voted for candidate
  • Redistribute the votes of the eliminate candidate voters to their highest ranked candidate which hasn’t been eliminated
  • Repeat until someone reaches a majority

And compared to in STV:

  • Tally all votes
  • See if any candidate has hit the threshold percentage of votes needed for winning, if so redistribute the extra votes they don’t need to the voter’s other next highest rated candidates
  • Eliminate least voted for candidate
  • Redistribute the votes of the eliminated candidate voters to their highest ranked candidate which hasn’t been eliminated
  • Repeat until you find all candidates you wanted

And with STV, you determine the threshold by how many candidates you want, so for 5 candidates it would be 20%. Though you might end up with less then 5 candidates winning due to some votes being discarded, so rules such as “If there is only 1 seat left and 1 candidate, then said candidate wins” can be used to mitigate that.

So the algorithms are really similar and mostly complement each other!

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Actually, in terms of a minimum threshold, I’m happy with probably any normal ranked choice system. So alternative vote andand STV both qualify.

For a single candidate, I’m pretty confident we can’t do better than the alternative vote.

For STV, I was actually unaware of it until now! Its certainly compelling, and I can’t see any immediate problems. But I also havent had years to think about it like I have with the alternative vote.

If we needed to make a decison right now for Aux, STV would be my top choice since we will often be voting for multiple candidates and I absolutely think some kind of proportional representation is needed to prevent echo chambers.

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Kubernetes has seen good success with the Condorcet method: Condorcet method - Wikipedia

They’ve managed to produce a well-accepted set of elected positions since they have adopted the strategy via Elekto: https://elekto.dev/

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For a single candidate, I’m pretty confident we can’t do better than the alternative vote.

IRV/AV is the special case of STV where the number of electable positions equals one. :slight_smile:

Condorcet methods are also about the case of a single electable position, but differ from IRV in that they aim to select least disliked options rather than most liked ones, making it intended for choices thought of as apolitical, while IRV/STV are political.

If y’all would excuse my example to demonstrate this, if reactionaries declare queer people controversial, Concordet (or their multi-position equivalents) would say no queer people elected, while STV would facilitate proportional representation.

So representation for one I believe would favor STV.

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