[Noisebridge-discuss] voting: approval vs condorcet

[Andy Isaacson]

I've been looking into Leif's argument that approval voting is a better
fit for Noisebridge's philosophy than the Condorcet method we used last
year.

I have an example that makes me think he might be right.

However, voting system examples are tricksy things, and I'd appreciate
another set of eyes.  Also, my example is for a single-winner election
whereas our election is for a 5-member board, and few of the voting
system examples address multi-winner elections.

My example follows.  Note that approval voting can be implemented by
Condorcet if weights are limited to {0, 1}.

% cat divisive.ballot
Position: Board
Candidates:  Bob Charlie Evillia

# 60% of the voters think Evillia is the best candidate, but the other
# 40% think she'd be terrible.  80% agrees that Bob would be a
# reasonable candidate, across both sides.

2 - 1
2 - 1
2 - 1
2 - 1
- - 1
- 1 1
1 - -
1 2 -
1 2 -
1 2 -
% ./election.py divisive.ballot
Election results saved to: 2010-12-30-Board.txt
#     Winner: Evillia
% sed s/2/1/g < divisive.ballot > approval.ballot
% ./election.py approval.ballot
Election results saved to: 2010-12-30-Board.txt
#     Winner: Bob

Thoughts?

-andy