Talk:WikiConference UK 2012/Elections/Questions

Why can't questions be asked of specific candidates? There is no such rule mentioned on last year's page (although the layout of the page does assume it). These elections are a very serious matter and if someone has concerns about a particular candidate they should be able to share those concerns with the rest of the membership. Doing so via a question (so as to automatically give the candidate right-of-reply) makes a lot of sense to me. There are also less controversial questions that won't be relevant to every candidate - for example, it would be sensible to ask outgoing board members what they feel their greatest achievement on the board had been and what they would have liked to have done/done better, but there is no point asking that of people that haven't been on the board. --Tango (talk) 09:32, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

We ('the tellers') were concerned that there would be a 'pile on' of dozens of tangentially questions for one candidate, which is something we want to avoid. For example, if I was running for board, there might be lots of questions about my time on ArbCom, or lots of questions about the health of my wife. However, I've spoken to James (the other teller), and we've decided that we'll allow people to ask questions of individual candidates, within reason. Any inappropriate questions will be removed reactively, and the tellers will have the final say on whether or not a question is appropriate. We'll be pretty relaxed about it, but we need to be able to stop any disruption of the process by non-members. Richard Symonds (talk) 13:26, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Electoral system

We are using a rather primitive though easy to count electoral system. One of the problems of approval voting is that there is a natural tendency amongst voters to either just support a candidate they know and not evaluate the others, tactically support a small number of candidates who they strongly support and ignore or oppose the others, or assume they should only support as many candidates as there are seats. All of those tactics have the same effect - they make approval voting with a 50% threshold vulnerable in situations where there are too many good candidates. With 17 candidates going for 7 places it is almost inevitable that the most popular candidates will get much lower percentages of support than last year when 8 candidates stood for 7 seats. At an extreme but possible scenario, if two candidates were universally popular and all voters supported them plus five others, then we could have two candidates with 100% support and 15 with 33.33% support. A system where the more good candidates you have the greater the risk that you don't fill all the available seats is a "fail unsafe" system. I'd be more comfortable with a preference based system. WereSpielChequers (talk) 23:20, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Will you be attending the AGM? There will be a discussion on the voting system for future elections then, which I shall be leading. -- LondonStatto (talk) 19:32, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

I've been thinking about that as well. It is a potential problem. If we want to keep it simple, we could do a kind of hybrid approval-preferential voting system. Rather than voting "yes" or "no" to each candidate, you vote "support", "acceptable", "oppose" (whether no vote should count as acceptable or oppose, I'm not sure). The winners are chosen based on the support votes, but the 50% rule is applied to the combined support and acceptable votes (acceptables can be used to break ties, too). This approach makes sense, since it separates the question of who you think should be on the board from the question of who you think would be better than no-one. --Tango (talk) 20:06, 19 April 2012 (UTC)