william(at)elan.net wrote:
Julian Mehnle wrote:
william(at)elan.net wrote:
For voting, I think either Approval or Condorcet will work fine
[...] What I'm however concerned is possibility of large
organization (commercial or otherwise) asking its members/employers
to join SPF in order to advance certain candidate(s) - with large
enough base of additional people not even Condorcet will stop them
from gaining the majority.
Well, whenever groups of people are engaged in democratic elections,
there's always the risk of being "taken over". I think a good
solution to that would be to require voters to register themselves a
month or two in advance of the election.
Same thing - those who want to take over will register month or two
prior to elections :)
You overlooked half of my statement. You won't be able to prevent that.
You can just make it harder. And as long as we don't require voters to
become formal members of the project and pay a significant yearly
membership fee, outside folks will always be able to take over the
democratic bodies of the project with relative ease. I think that's a
feature at least as much as it is a bug.
I suggested a "good" solution, not a "perfect" solution, because there is
no "perfect" solution.
Or what would _you_ do to prevent outsiders from taking over the council?
1. If you remove candidates simply because someone raises an
objection, you open yourself to "DoS" attacks from outside.
If you let everyone into the commision you end up with possibility of it
being taken over as well [...]. The whole point is that you let people
see who wants to be on it and if they know the person to be true to the
SPF goals and be able to properly decide on the same about candidates
[...]
I'm very well aware of the point you're trying to make, and I have not
suggested letting everyone into the electoral committee. I just said
there has to be a better procedure than "anyone on spf-discuss can
object - but only to one candidate - and that person is then removed".
Maybe we just need to reword your proposal a bit: "any eligible voter can
object to any candidate for the electoral committee on reasonable grounds,
and that person is then removed". Yes, I know "on reasonable grounds" is
fuzzy. In theory, the best solution would probably be to also form an
arbitration panel who decides such things, but I think that would be a
serious case of over-engineering.
2. The electoral committee shouldn't be able to veto candidates for
the council on arbitrary grounds. I think the committee should be
restricted to formal decisions.
I agree, there should be some rules that it should follow when
evaluating candidates and their qualifications. But I also think it
should have fairly strong powers to be able to protect spf community
from takeover and that requires for example being able to not accept
candidate who is not active in SPF Community or has been active only
for very short time.
Every power can be abused. We (or at least _I_) don't want to have
elections decided by court-like institutions. This is kind of a chicken
and egg problem: either you trust the electorate or you don't. If we want
to keep things simple, I think we should err on the side of the former.
I still think the electoral committee should be restricted to deciding
formal matters.
Julian Mehnle.