So I have been debating on who to vote for in the new mods vote over here and it got me thinking about how I would prefer if I could vote for a few different accounts.

It reminded me of the video series by CPG Grey on voting, a good watch for more information (youtube link), and it got me wondering if for similar votes in the future if we should use something more similar to Single Transferable Vote?

As a quick example; if there are 5 candidates and 3 eventual winners, you rank your votes, but you also don’t have to list everyone. You could vote for 1, 3, or all 5, you just rank them in order of preference. Then when the vote tally comes, you just take any leftover votes from the person with the least votes and apply them to the voters second choice, etc…, until you have your winners.

I think it would really help in votes similar to the mod one, because that would let me vote for the 2-4 accounts I would be interested in seeing become a mod, without my one vote getting lost just because only 4 other people voted the same, or in cases where the vote is very close, if that makes sense.

It could be a little over complicated, but was curious if anyone else had similar feelings about the vote, or any future ones that are not just yay / nay.

  • @carbon_basedEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Fine idea.
    Given it can get extracted by script, we could simply instruct each vote should contain a list of rankings in a specific format, like … brainstorming:

    • Let’s say, there are 5 options/candidates, a vote could look like
      4,5,2,1,3
      where candidate 4 would get 5 points, candidate 5 gets 4 points, and so on.
    • Separators could be made flexible, “4, 5, 2, 1,3”… to make it a bit syntax-tolerant.
    • The script/bot should be able to return two lists, each with username / home instance / points per candidate / original posted string; one list with positive recognition (and totals) and one for the erroneous. Could be put in spreadsheets or posted as tables.
    • It would work with only two options as well.

    Edit …
    The more i think about it, the more i come to the pont that this method would be elegantly simplistic. [shoulderpat] ;-)

    • It’s highly accessible, no fancy stuff or external tools required. All can be done with what is available in Lemmy anyway, and it’s client-agnostic.
    • A bot could post like three .csv lists; the two detailed ones i suggested above, and a “tally” one, that could already contain some fancy statistics, like votes per instance, or double usernames.
    • All is openly accessible.

    Cons:

    • Perhaps not as error-resistant as a custom interface would be … but errors can happen anyhow.
    • Concealed voting is not possible.

    Alerts:

    • If there is no way to rank options equally, then in an equal-preference situation, the option which is listed first on the ballot will likely have an advantage. People are more likely to enter numbers in order than to swap them.
      Fix: should have a way to assign equal rank to options, like
      (4, 5), 2
      In this example, 4 and 5 would get (5+4)/2=4.5 points each (not 5 because that would give slightly more total weight to the vote), 3 points for option 2, and (2+1)/2=1.5 points to each of the remaining options 1 and 3. (And no such things are not too complex for my mind, as someone elsewhere wanted to suggest to me.)
    • My suggestion here is counting all rankings, not having a winner determined by the sums of first choices, which would introduce some complexity and possible elimination of ballots: https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV)
      So rather than giving the first choice an excessive gravity and counting second choices only if that didn’t meet the threshold (thereby determining a majority from the rankings at the cost of ballots that didn’t present a full ranking), this allows for determining even or “unconclusive” preferences. I also had the possibility of multiple selection in mind. Keep it simple.