Any final questions for myself or the other nominees?

Anyone remember how to get access to SE's free copies of OpenSTV? They used to link to it somewhere

ah, check a previous year's ballot link. here's the link to our previous election: rpg.stackexchange.com/election/1 you can find the download link for OpenSTV there if you want to run the results this afternoon and check them for yourselves

@DuckTapeAl OpenSTV is a program that tabulates transferable voting system ballots

I understood every word in that sentence. :D

in our elections, you get 3 votes. The way it works is that all the first place votes are counted, then it determines a threshold and if a candidate has met that threshold, they have won the election. If no candidate wins, the lowest candidate is eliminated and then all of their votes are cancelled and instead the second place choice on those ballots is used.

Aha.

And OpenSTV lets you assure that the whole process has worked correctly?

@DuckTapeAl yeah, it basically lets you run the election yourself

(unofficially)

When a candidate meets the threshold, it figures out exactly how many votes they needed and then assigns a fractional value to those votes and the remainder to their second choice

(and so on and so forth), we'll only have a few rounds as there are 2 mods to be elected out of 3 candidates.

For instance, if no one meets the threshold in the first round, the election is over. (as the 3rd place candidate is eliminated and you are left with 2 mods). If someone does meet the threshold then we'll have one more round. (after which the second candidate will have met the threshold or the 3rd place candidate will be eliminated)

so we have a maximum of 2 rounds

if you want to see something more typical, SO's election will have a lot of rounds most likely, with 3 spots in 10 candidates

the STV actually doesnt matter because we have only 3 people for 2 slots

however if we had a 4th it would instantly matter a great deal

@JoshuaAslanSmith it matters in the second case, where one person meets the threshold. Then second place ballots come into play. (Because 2 and 3 from Round 1 could flip flop)

@waxeagle I had forgotten about the additional votes of someone surpassing the threshold being transferred

I respectfully admit my wrongheadedness

Im a bit fired up about something very political happening with ROTC across the country right now

@JoshuaAslanSmith :( not fun

also, no harm there, STV is not something many folks are familiar with (specially in the US)

only reason I know it is that I've been around SE doing moderatory things for so long

@waxeagle Ive watched CCPGrey's videos on it

I just forgot that bit

because I was also thinking about elections where no one meet the threshold (10 candidates for 3 slots)

so in that case its just bumping off each small guy in turn after the previous small guys votes were transferred

@JoshuaAslanSmith yup. That's your typical STV election

small candidate pools with a similar number of seats available produce some interesting results. Specifically the single round tabulation with only a clear 3rd place...

where no one "wins" exactly

yep

(and in a sense everyone wins)

depending on how similar the counts are

@DuckTapeAl a nice video series explaning STV that ive put into a playlist

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3uUqBi3_qavAIMMBGU8bFnjlUqgz4hMn

And now for the final round of the election, the dance off portion of the competition.

What that video taught me is that JAS is a lion, and thus can't be trusted. :)

lol

because Im a monarchist?

No, because lions are tricksy.

@JoshuaAslanSmith Nice and simple video

yeah he has more expanding past that one getting into the nitty gritty of various methods like hare or droop and then shows a couple of example elections and how it all shakes out.

woo! OpenSTV installed and cranked up, ready to run the election!

 R|SevenSidedDie  |wax eagle      |Joshua Aslan Sm|Exhausted      |Surplus        |Threshold
  |               |               |ith            |               |               |
==================================================================================================
 1|     242.000000|      49.000000|      33.000000|       0.000000|     133.999999|     108.000001
  |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  | Count of first choices. Candidate SevenSidedDie has reached the threshold and is elected.