[python-committers] Vote on governance will happen between Nov 16 - Nov 30

[Tim Peters]

[Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io>]

> ...
> I’m struggling to find a resource besides that doesn’t also include
> shilling for another voting system or isn’t a lengthy paper but
> https://rangevoting.org/IRVpartic.html gives an example and
> https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html is a more complex example.
>

The rangevoting site has a great deal of info about all sorts of voting
systems.  Over a decade ago, Ka-Ping Yee (who used to be very active in
Python development) ran some _visual_ voting simulations on 5 popular
systems, which scared him (& me) away from IRV forever:

    http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

"""
The following images visually demonstrate how Plurality penalizes centrist
candidates and Borda favours them; how Approval and Condorcet yield nearly
identical results; and how the Hare method yields extremely strange
behaviour. Alarmingly, the Hare method (also known as "IRV") is gaining
momentum as the most popular type of election-method reform in the United
States (in Berkeley, Oakland, and just last November in San Francisco, for
example).
"""

That said, in the absence of political factions maneuvering to increase
their own power over time, with money and marketing clout to persuade
voters to play along, I'm not much concerned about the system used for a
one-shot vote.  Even if we all strive to be as "strategic" and/or
"tactical" as possible, we'll all be pushing in different directions.

One massive (to my eyes) advantage of range voting is that it never pays to
give your true favorite less than your top score, or your true
least-favorite more than your bottom score.  (Note:  the "approval voting"
used for PSF elections is essentially range voting limited to two possible
scores - and it should be very easy in that context to see that it can't
pay to approve a candidate you don't approve of, or vice versa.)
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