ANN: Ballot for Complementary PEP308 Ternary VOTE

[Norman Petry]

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 20:48, Erik Max Francis wrote:
> Norman Petry wrote:
> 
> > This is NOT a ballot for the "official" PEP-308 vote being run by
> > Raymond Hettinger.  It is for a different vote that is intended to
> > COMPLEMENT the results of the official vote, by using a different type
> > of ballot, and a different method of tallying the results (Condorcet's
> > Method), for those who may be interested.  If enough people choose to
> > participate, it will provide a high-quality source of additional
> > information about the preferences of the Python community regarding
> > the
> > ternary operator.
> 
> In my opinion this is a very bad idea.  All a second concurrent vote is
> going to do is create more confusion about which vote is official,
> whether people have already voted, etc.

I do not see how I could possibly have been more clear about which vote
is official -- for those of you who might be confused: it ISN'T MINE.  

I honestly see no reason to believe that any one will be confused by
this additional vote.  Each of the posted ballots has its own
self-contained and consistent procedure for submission.  Whichever
ballot the voter uses, they will generally just forward the message via
email to the specified address, filling in the ballot and removing the
directions before sending it.  There hasn't been any confusion so far,
in the 20 or so ballots I've received.

> Saying "This is not the official vote" and "This is a different vote" is
> all well and good, but conducting the vote at all is going to great more
> confusion than it is going to be worth.  Imagine five or six people
> getting the same idea and concurrently conducting their own (unofficial)
> votes, all while we're still waiting for the results on the official one
> (the only one which counts).

I don't think we need to worry about that particular slippery slope :-) 
Organizing a vote like this is a fair amount of work, so I do not
foresee another half-dozen people deciding to conduct their own polls
any time soon.  

I clearly stated in my ballot message that I will NOT be posting the
results of my vote until AFTER the voting period for the official vote
is complete.  I have no wish to bias the outcome of the official vote in
any way by prematurely releasing results.

> 
> > The two-day nomination period for additional syntax proposals has now
> > ENDED.  No additional nominations were received, so the ballot is as
> > follows:
> 
> Uh, I never even read about any nomination period _beginning_.
> 

Damn.

I posted it to Usenet, and had thought that the message would be routed
to the mailing list as well, but it seems that something went wrong.  I
now cannot find the message in the mailing list archives, or anywhere on
the web!  Maybe that's why the response to the nomination period wasn't
very good (or maybe it's because people felt that 21 choices was more
than enough...)

The strange thing is that I DID receive one early response via email on
March 3rd, so at least some people must have received this message:

ANNOUNCE: Complementary VOTE re: PEP 308 Ternary Proposal, Sun, 02 Mar
2003 17:44:33 -0600

I can only suppose that the message was cancelled by someone, although I
can't understand why (it was long - about 500 lines, but I've seen
messages double that length.  Is there some limit on message size that I
violated?  I'm a beginner when it comes to Usenet).

Anyway, the subject of my vote and the reasons for it were explained in
that message, so I will resend some or all of it tomorrow so that people
have the necessary background information.  The unofficial vote will
continue as planned in any case -- too late to turn back now, even if I
wanted to.

--
Norman Petry