[EM] Request for help: complex election

[Nikhil Nair]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Eric Gorr wrote:

> At 5:24 PM +0000 3/9/04, Nikhil Nair wrote:
> >While this is certainly interesting, and may well be a better system than
> >typically used in common political elections, I don't think this is the
> >solution I'm looking for.
> 
> This is mostly just a random idea fraught with many problems that I 
> am sure people will point out, but why not run a modified version of 
> an Approval election and take the top vote getters.
> 
> Since you wanted the board votes to count more (you mentioned 60-40)
> 
> for each candidate, take the total number of votes cast by the board 
> and multiply it by .6. Also, for each candidate, take the total 
> number of votes cast by non-board members and multiply it by .4.
> 
> Add these two totals together for the final total for each candidate.

(Just to clarify, you mean Council, as the Board is what we're
electing...)

This was our starting point, when we discussed it a few days ago.  What we
(and now you) missed was that the turnout from the membership is likely to
be around 80, compared to 15 from the Council.  Also, since the turnout
from the membership could easily double one year to the next, we don't
want to make assumptions about how many will vote.

The modifications I was thinking of was simply dividing the number of
votes by the turnout (e.g. 12 out of 15 from the Council would be 75%),
before multiplying by 0.6 or 0.4.  Then we're comparing apples with
apples, and variation in turnout wont' matter.

My final twist was the veto (at least 20% from both), so we get less than
4 if there aren't 4 good candidates.

So, have I missed a fatal flaw somewhere?

Cheers,

Nikhil.