Meeker's disasterous attempt at counting (Now featuring accurate numbers!)

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Also, I think for transparency reasons, it would really be nice if the voters understood the system. I'm not too sure I like your attitude toward this is. 

I've done some work on "voter education," but I think it will be hard for voters to understand the election until they've already had one under their belts.

The most simplest way I can think of explaning things is this:

In this election, you're going to continue to rank your choices by number, like you always have before.  The only difference is that this election will ultimately result in five winners, instead of just one.

To do this, we will divide the total number of votes cast by six to come up with the droop quota—the number of votes a candidate will need to win election.  Lower prefences will be used as needed (and candidates who cannot win will be mathematically eliminated) until the vote totals of five of those candidates is equal to the quota.

It has been mentioned before (by myself) that in PR-STV, the person you give first preference to is crucial for the following reason: in each round of voting, your ballot counts towards that person—and no one else—at the highest weight possible (one full vote) until that candidate is either elected or mathematically eliminated from winning.

If the candidate is mathematically eliminated, your "full vote" moves to your second preference.  If your first preference candidate is elected, then that person's vote total is immediately reduced down to the "droop quota," and the excess votes are then redistributed.

If there are extra votes for the person you gave first preference to, your vote will start working for the person you second preferenced at a reduced rate—the more the person you voted first preference for exceeds the quota by, the stronger your vote will count towards your second preference.  (Or, conversely, the more your first preference candidate needed your vote, the weaker the value of your second preference vote gets.)


For example, if there are four voters and two seats to be elected, and the votes are cast like this:

Voter 1:  A, B, C, D
Voter 2:  A, C, B, D
Voter 3:  B, A, D, C
Voter 4:  A, C, B, D

We first calculate the droop quota (in Atlasia's case, the total number of voters divided by six; here, the total number of voters (4) divided by the total number of candidates to be elected plus one (3)).  The droop quota for this election is 4/3, or 1.33333.  A candidate will need at least 1.33333 first preference votes to be elected in the first round.

In this scenario, candidate A got 3 first preference votes, while candidate B got 1.  Candidate A is declared elected.

Since candidate A has 1.66667 votes more than needed to win, those extra votes are redistributed based on second preferences.  Of those who gave candidate A their second preference, two people voted for C, and one voted for B.  Redistributed proportionately, candidate C gains 1.11111 votes and candidate B gains 0.55555 votes.

These are added to the first preference votes still in effect for those two candidates, Candidate B has now exceeded the droop quota with 2.11111 votes and is elected.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

What happens if you accidentally use a fairly high up number twice, as I just noticed (within the twenty minutes, thankfully) that I had. Is the whole ballot discarded or only the pref.s from there on?

I'd only discard the preferences from that number and lower.  If I can determine intent from part of the ballot, then I would use the information from that part of the ballot.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Thought I'd be able to do at least reasonably well.

Well I would say that given that you didn't vote for yourself; that you are the #3 candidate on the PLP ticket (and indeed you voted to put yourself in that #3 spot); and that you haven't made a very visible campaigning effort for votes - it could be perceived that you haven't been entirely concerned about winning a Senate seat, which may be being reflected in the votes so far.

The bolded part is essentially what did it.  Even the no-shot-in-hellers voted themselves #1, which puts them in front of you almost by default.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

I actually have four votes.

DWTL's vote is invalid, as he has not met the minimum statutory threshold of 15 posts between April 18 and Feb 22, 2008.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

One thing I'm not quite clear on.  If an candidate is eliminated and a voter has as their next preference a candidate that has already met quota, does that candidate's surplus get refigured, or skipped?  It makes a difference in the numbers at least since EarlAW meets quota and then is in a position to pick up transfered votes from Sensei.

Essentially, what I did in my count is increased the value of all EarlAW's transfer votes from 1/10 vote to 2/11 vote.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

One thing I'm not quite clear on.  If an candidate is eliminated and a voter has as their next preference a candidate that has already met quota, does that candidate's surplus get refigured, or skipped?  It makes a difference in the numbers at least since EarlAW meets quota and then is in a position to pick up transfered votes from Sensei.

Essentially, what I did in my count is increased the value of all EarlAW's transfer votes from 1/10 vote to 2/11 vote.

How does that affect the result?
My heart skipped a beat when it saw that in your results as I'd never heard of such a thing before... although after some thought, it does make sense and somewhat decreases the randomness factor.

I believe vote in question was Xahar's.  The "good news" is that Xahar didn't preference Culture King (but did preference yourself and Afleitch).  It seems to have the effect of boosting your vote total to the detriment of the rest of the liberal bloc.   Jas and I do not believe that Culture King would have placed higher than 6th as a result of the "glitch," but I'll be re-running the numbers tonight, just to re-verify (and to get an accurate "final" count).

Damnit, Xahar's vote goes from Rocky -> Lewis -> Afleitch.  I'm going to rerun the numbers tonight, and in the meantime, I sent Lewis and CultureKing both PMs detailing my initial impressions of the recalc.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Colin and Afleitch elected. Even if whole redistributed surpluses flow to Lewis, the tiebreaker rule elects Culture King.

Yeah, like I said in the PM I talked about earlier, it looks like this is the case—the incorrectly flowed vote from Xahar appears to have elected Culture King at the expense of Lewis Trondheim.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Let the calls for my resignation begin!

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

I am of course assuming that you didn't pick that interpretation precisely in order not to have to declare CultureKing elected. But I think that's a fair assumption to make.

YOU KNOW ME
ALWAYS IN TEH POCKET OF THE JCP