Internetnz is the main New Zealand Internet lobby and policy organisation. More or less they take money from .nz fees and redirect it to benefit the New Zealand Internet and Internet users.
In a few days there is an election for it’s president and council. Following a post by Andy Linton to the NZNOG mailing list about the “need for a strong voice from the technical community” several technical people have put their name forward for council.
Following a discussion on the Internetnz mailing list I realised that many people are unsure of the best way to rank a list of candidates to ensure the “best” result. Looking around I was unable to find a good reference for this online so I thought I’d write a quick post here. I should give the disclaimer that I’m not an expert in this are so possibly I’ve made an error. I’m also only addressing the Council Vote note the President and Vice-President votes.
Voting System
The voting system for Internetnz is outlined here but what it simply means for the voter is that they rank the candidates from 1st to last. For each council seat the lowest polling candidates are eliminated and their votes allocated to the next preference until one has an absolute majority. For the next council seat it happens again except the ballots that had the previous round winner as first preference are eliminated from any further consideration.
You can see what happened last year here . There were 9 candidates, 6 seats and 90 voters. Rounds 1 through 7 show people being eliminated and their votes transferred around until Jamie Baddeley is elected. On Round 9 it starts again but 16 votes have been removed from the pool, these are the people who voted for Jamie as their first preference.
In rounds 9 though 15 the eliminations continue until Michael Wallmannsberger is elected. Then his 16 first preference votes are removed and it starts again until all 6 candidates are elected. The 2006 result is also online .
The interesting thing to notice is that only ballots that put an elected candidate as the 1st preference are eliminated in the first round. So while the 16 people who voted for Jamie Baddeley helped elect him in the first round they had no influence in later rounds. On the other hand the 22 people who put Neal James, Carl Penwarden, Sam Sargent and Muchael Payne as their first preference got to participate in all 6 rounds of the election.
So what is the trick?
So out of the candidates I would characterise the following people as technical: Lenz Gschwendtner, Glen Eustace, Stewart Fleming, Andrew McMillan, Dudley Harris, Gerard Creamer, Nathan Torkington and Hamish MacEwan. This is eleven out of the 17 candidates running for the four council seats.
Now assuming that there is a some level of support for technical candidates the worst case would be that all “technical” voters put say Nathan Torkington (to pick a well known name) as first preference. Nathan is elected as the first candidate and then the technical voters have no further influence on the other 3 councillors.
Instead we want to make sure that techie votes elect as many candidates as possible.
So what should I do?
Note: I am using the term “round” below to refer to each council seat election ( 6 in 2008, 4 in 2009 )
If you have a group of voters and a ground of candidates you have two main objectives:
- Avoid giving a first preference to a candidate that will be elected in the early rounds so your ballot will participate in as many rounds as possible.
- Give enough first preferences to your candidate to ensure they are not eliminated early in each round
The first idea is easy. Don’t give you first preference to a technical candidate. However this is where the second objective comes in, you need to give them enough first preference votes so that they are not eliminated early in every round.
I think the following should work:
- Rank all the candidates in you order of preference
- Decide how far down the list you are “happy” with the candidates (ie the 11 techies listed above)
- Randomly (yes, really randomly) pick one of the acceptable people and put them as your first preference.
The idea now is that if say we have 40 technical people voting then each of the 11 technical candidates will end up with at least 3 or 4 first preference votes. As the lowest ranked of these is eliminated then preferences will flow to the other technical candidates (in order of most popular) . If a technical candidate is elected only around 1/10 of the technical ballots will be eliminated from later rounds so there is still a good chance of electing other candidates.
What could go wrong?
It’s possible than the random allocation of first preferences will result in a popular candidate ( eg Nathan Torkington ) randomly getting a smaller number of first preferences and being eliminated early in every round. I think this is a small risk since
- it is likely that popular candidates will get first preferences from other voters
- popular candidates will have a higher random chance of people put as first preference since they will be in the “acceptable” list of more techie voters
- Even if this does happen others in the slate will still get in.
Feel free to let me know any questions ( or point out horrible errors I’ve made)
