[helene_t]

han, on 2013-January-04, 08:46, said:

If not I suggest all Justin voters strategically pick his pass vs 2H post.

Obviously we should apply the "alternative vote" as it was called in the recent debate about electoral reform in the UK. You can pick one Justin post with another (say) Justin post as substitute. Then as soon as it appears that your first pick is not going to make it, your vote is transfered to your second choice. That system is (almost) immune to tactical voting.

[han]

How does that system work? Say there are three choices, A, B and C. 40% of the population votes for A, and picks B as substitute. 25% of the population votes for B, and picks C as substitute. 35% of the population votes for C, but picks A as substitute. Who wins?

[MickyB]

helene_t, on 2013-January-04, 09:15, said:

Obviously we should apply the "alternative vote" as it was called in the recent debate about electoral reform in the UK. You can pick one Justin post with another (say) Justin post as substitute. Then as soon as it appears that your first pick is not going to make it, your vote is transfered to your second choice. That system is (almost) immune to tactical voting.

Under AV, the post that comes 2nd or 3rd may win!

[helene_t]

If the relation is transitive we should just use the nominee that beats everyone else head on head.

In your case the relation is non-transitive so the system defaults to a heuristic that first eliminates B, then reassigns the B-votes to C. So C wins.

This is a bit arbitrary but usually the relation is transitive. Maybe this is not a good assumption for such small polls as this one.

So maybe my idea wasn't so well thought through. Not sure what would be a better alternative, though.

[MickyB]

han, on 2013-January-04, 10:02, said:

How does that system work? Say there are three choices, A, B and C. 40% of the population votes for A, and picks B as substitute. 25% of the population votes for B, and picks C as substitute. 35% of the population votes for C, but picks A as substitute. Who wins?

The lowest-scoring candidate gets eliminated first and their votes reassigned, then the second-lowest, etc. I am not sure what happens in the event of a tie.

[daveharty]

Thanks all, nominations are closed. I will create official voting polls later this weekend, and then voting will be open for about a week.

As far as how the voting will be done, I'm not going to get too scientific. I'll try and get each category down to somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-7 options (in the case of Individual Post, I will probably do this by limiting it to one nomination per poster, by selecting the "best" (in my view, or in what seems to be the popular view) post by a given poster; the only people affected by this will by JLOGIC and mgoetze, who had three and two nominations in the category, respectively). Then I'll just create the polls, and whichever nominee has the most votes at the end of the voting period is the winner. I'm not concerned about ties; that just means we would get to award two Posties, rather than one. If, in the future, people would prefer a more complex system designed to arrive at a "clear winner" every time, I'm open to that, but it's not a subject that I have any interest in myself.

[mgoetze]

daveharty, on 2013-January-05, 07:57, said:

(in the case of Individual Post, I will probably do this by limiting it to one nomination per poster, by selecting the "best" (in my view, or in what seems to be the popular view) post by a given poster; the only people affected by this will by JLOGIC and mgoetze, who had three and two nominations in the category, respectively).

Good luck with that, I think the two posts of mine which were nominated are very different and nominated for entirely different reasons. But I don't expect to win anyway so I'm fine with whatever you do.

I could get into a detailed explanation of why STV (or "AV" as it is now known in the UK) is inferior to proper preferential voting systems which satisfy the Condorcet criterion, but I won't and instead just suggest a practical alternative: approval voting. This is as simple as enabling the "can select multiple answers" option in the poll. If you feel strongly that a particular post should be POTY, you can vote for only that one, otherwise just choose all the options you would be happy with as POTY (e.g. Han could vote for all of JLOGIC's posts).

[daveharty]

mgoetze, on 2013-January-05, 08:25, said:

...but I won't and instead just suggest a practical alternative: approval voting. This is as simple as enabling the "can select multiple answers" option in the poll.

I like this idea, I think I will do this.