On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 12:32:00PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: > It seems to me that a 3:1 majority is exceedingly excessive; requiring > 75% of people to agree seems to me to be an unreasonably high limit. > > -- John
The other viewpoint: one "simple" vote and 25% of Developers have the Constitution yanked from under them. Seems like a classic Tyranny of the Majority illustrated so well by the way bannana republics like the U.S. and Australia treat their minority populations. On a related issue, supermajorities aren't quite this simple though. I cannot quite fathom how supermajorities and Condorcet counting work together, and this bothers me. Hopefully the Secretary will present us with very simple supermajority ballots so that the working is more obvious than the general case. I think I would encourage people to rank whatever they wish 1st, and Further Discussion 2nd on supermajority ballots so that options not supported by 75% of the membership as their first preference cannot pass. A.6. Concorde Vote Counting 7. If a supermajority is required the number of Yes votes in the final ballot is reduced by an appropriate factor. Strictly speaking, for a supermajority of F:A, the number of ballots which prefer Yes to X (when considering whether Yes Dominates X or X Dominates Yes) or the number of ballots whose first (remaining) preference is Yes (when doing STV comparisons for winner and elimination purposes) is multiplied by a factor A/F before the comparison is done. This means that a 2:1 vote, for example, means twice as many people voted for as against; abstentions are not counted. 8. If a quorum is required, there must be at least that many votes which prefer the winning option to the default option. If there are not then the default option wins after all. For votes requiring a supermajority, the actual number of Yes votes is used when checking whether the quorum has been reached.