Ed Murphy wrote: >I call for judgement on the following linked statements: > > 1) Quorum for a proposal is based on the number of eligible > voters at the start of the voting period. > > 2) Quorum for a proposal is based on the number of eligible > voters at the end of the voting period. > > 3) Quorum for a proposal is based on the maximum number of > eligible voters at any time during the voting period.
For reference, these CFJs have been assigned the numbers 1673 to 1675 inclusive. This is a proto-pseudo-judgement; it is circulated for comments, and absent major disagreement is intended to become the judgement of the Hanging Judge. Quorum is defined by R879. Its core definition is "one third the number of eligible voters". The other clauses modify this a bit, but not in the ways that matter. So quorum is based on the number of eligible voters; not the number of eligible voters at any particular time. CFJ 1652 has already found that the set of eligible voters can change during the voting period. Although not explicitly addressed by CFJ 1652, the same argument extends to allowing the set of eligible voters to continue to change after the voting period. Putting these together, I find that quorum for a proposal can also change, correspondingly, during and after the voting period. Therefore all three of these statements, which attempt to set a single quorum value for each proposal, must be judged FALSE. I shall proceed to answer the underlying question of what is the quorum value that actually matters for a proposal. Quorum is used in R955 part (b), which comes into play when the vote collector is determining the outcome of the Agoran decision. This is not at a particular defined time, such as the end of the voting period. It is necessarily no earlier than the end of the voting period, and similarly no later than when the Agoran decision is resolved by publishing voting results are published. R955 curiously does not simply describe a mathematical recipe for determining the result of an Agoran decision. Instead it is explicitly formulated as a set of obligations on the vote collector, constituting a set of calculation steps that the vote collector is required to execute, personally and in sequence. It therefore seems most likely that the time at which quorum becomes relevant is the time when the vote collector actually makes this calculation. The vote collector has some latitude in choosing the time, and it appears that eir choice of time to perform this calculation influences the matter of quoracy. -zefram
