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As part of a test to determine the viability of using the alternative voting system, I am running a mock election of the last Underhusen election. This election is for testing only, is not official, and its outcome will not effect the Underhusen in any way. This mock election will end in 24 hours. Thanks for your participation!

Instructions: To vote, rank the candidates in order of preference of most to least wanted in a post in this topic or in a personal message to me. If you do not want to vote for a candidate at all, do not list them.

Candidates for Underhusen:
Govindia
Reon
Ulkhak
Hugsim
Chanku
Joshua Bluteisen
tatte
Denth Kasten

-snip-

Candidates for Underhusen:
Govindia
Hugsim
Ulkhak
tatte
Denth Kasten

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S4 via Tapatalk

You know that you can rank more than five candidates, right?

Ranking based voting tends to help less popular candidates get better representation and minimize the need for runoff elections.


Joshua Bluteisen
Hugsim
Reon
Ulkhak
tatte
Denth Kasten
Chanku
Govindia

Question...would it be better if I included eight blank space on the ballot?

There's a relatively difficult question of whether we should always count five or always count for the amount of people running... I'm generally more inclined to keep it to five but that's mostly because I think regularity is nice and obviously sometimes I don't want to vote for anyone at all, based off  he sheer number of abstains this last election.

Even if there was the ability to rank all the candidates, there wouldn't be a requirement to.

The way I'm looking at it, if there's 8 candidates and 8 slots, it'd be a bad idea to open it up.  Usually when we vote and we list our 5 choices, every candidate listed gets a vote.  So what would be the point of listing all of them if only the first 5 get a vote?  Would the other 3 get a vote as well?  Unless people chose to abstain on the last three slots, wouldn't that potentially cause an 8 way tie if all 8 candidates listed got a vote from each person?

Keeping it at 5 seems more reasonable.  Why list candidates that you didn't want to vote for in the first place?  So they can see their name and fall under the impression that you ARE going to vote for them, even if they're in slot 6-8?  It just seems like it wouldn't make sense on quite a few levels.  Anyways, my choices would e:

1. Denth Kasten
2. Hugsim
3. Reon
4. Joshua Bluteisen
5. Ulkhak

I don't think it makes a functional difference, but I thought people might feel like they've better expressed themselves if they could put people in those last three places, and if we can allow that with no functional difference why not? If someone wants to only vote for as many positions are open and effectively abstain from the others, it's also an option that also doesn't make a functional difference, so people are free to go either way unless we specifically only allow ranks up to the number of open positions.

That was my thinking behind it, at least.

I can understand that, and with as many people that we have that abstain from voting even all 5 candidates, it shouldn't be too big of a deal if we open it up to 8.

I think that it'd be good to let people rank as many candidates as they want. I also think that it'd be good to add a better explanation of how the voting works.

After extensive consultation with Hugsim and Eluvatar for the alternate vote rounds, here is how we handed this vote.

Traditional Method
These would have been the results if the vote had been conducted using the current FPTP system. Hugsim, Reon, Ulkhak, and tatte would win outright and Josh and Denth would be in a run-off for the remaining seat.

Hugsim - 6
Reon - 4
Ulkhak - 4
tatte - 4
Denth Kasten - 3
Joshua Bluteisen - 3
Govindia - 2
Chanku - 1

Average Ranking
This is the average preference rank for each candidate. For purposes of this measure, if a voter didn't assign a rank to a candidate, those votes were not counted for or against the candidate. If we had used this method (which I included just for my own curiosity), Hugs, Reon, tatte, Josh, and Denth would have won.

Hugsim - 1.50
Reon - 3.40
tatte - 3.80
Joshua Bluteisen - 4.00
Denth Kasten - 4.60
Chanku - 4.75
Ulkhak - 4.80
Govindia - 5.25

Median Ranking
Again, just for my own curiosity, here is the median ranking of candidates. For purposes of this measure, if a voter didn't assign a rank to a candidate, those votes were not counted for or against the candidate.

Hugsim - 1.50
Reon - 3.00
Joshua Bluteisen - 3.50
tatte - 4
Ulkhak - 5
Chanku - 5
Denth Kasten - 5
Govindia - 6

Alternative Voting
So here we go...

Round 1:
Hugsim - 3, Govindia - 1, Josh - 1, Denth - 1, tatte - 0, Chanku - 0, Reon - 0, Ulkhak - 0
Hugsim declared winner, .33 votes transferred from Hugsim to Chanku, tatte, and Reon (second preference of those who voted Hugsim first preference)

Round 2:
Hugsim - 2, Govindia - 1, Josh - 1, Denth - 1, tatte - .33, Chanku - .33, Reon - .33, Ulkhak - 0
Ulkhak eliminated

Round 3:
Hugsim - 2, Govindia - 1, Josh - 1, Denth - 1, Reon - .66, tatte - .33, Chanku - 0, Ulkhak - 0
Chanku elminated (tie broken by eliminating tied candidate with lowest average rank), .33 votes transferred from Chanku to Reon. (third preference of voter who listed Hugsim first, then Chanku second)

Round 4:
Hugsim - 2, Denth - 1.33,  Govindia - 1, Josh - 1, Reon - .66, tatte - 0, Chanku - 0, Ulkhak - 0
tatte eliminated, .33 votes transferred to Denth Kasten (third preference of voter who listed Hugsim first and tatte second)

Winners declared: Hugsim, Denth Kasten, Govindia, Joshua Bluteisen, and Reon.