The EM vote on single-winner methods

[Steve Eppley]

It's been about a week since the voting deadline.  Let's start
drafting the results.  Anyone who hasn't yet voted or who wishes
to change his/her ballot can still do so until the report is nearly 
finished.  Ok?

I may want to change my own ballot to include Hugh's "write-in"
method.  Unless I change my ballot, I'll be counted as (un)ranking
Hugh's Condorcet variation "equally last", even below "None of the
Below".  I'm not sure yet if I want to leave it there.  (Maybe so,
regardless of whether it's technically decent, due to the Simplicity
standard.)

Mike O wrote to me that he thinks some people may prefer a hard and
fast deadline and suggested I propose a new one, since Marcus
apparently took issue with last Wednesday's deadline.  (I don't think
Marcus has voted yet, perhaps because he thinks it would be too late
now.)  I think Mike and I agree that the purpose of a deadline is to
encourage people to vote, not to exclude late votes, but I don't see
a need for another deadline.  I think we should just make an effort
to accomodate late votes as long as we can (until near the end of
the revision process), and we may as well just proceed to draft from
what we've got so far.

If Mike agrees with that, I hope he'll take the next step and collect 
our ballot messages into one.  Then we can all verify that none of 
our ballots are overlooked.  (Since Mike still has trouble with his 
message editor, maybe he should send the collected message to me and 
I'll delete the fluff.)

---Steve     (Steve Eppley    seppley at alumni.caltech.edu)