Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

@Robminchin thank you for this. I was considering setting up a real-name account there. I may now reconsider.

@tomruen On such boards (and for leadership positions of organizations where membership selection already ensures a fairly homogeneous group -- like political parties or Non-Profit boards) acceptance voting often works well.

Voters are allowed to vote for zero or more candidates that they find acceptable. The most broadly acceptable win. (or in some case go on to a first-past-the-post election). Having 90% or more of the electors showing that the winner is acceptable (even if not their favorite choice) can be quite empowering.

The downside is that the strategic voting modality is bullet voting -- voting for only one candidate. The more this occurs the stronger the insensitive for other to also vote strategically and the system devolves into traditional plurality voting.

@tomruen There is a mathematical proof (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) that for an election with more than two choices any Voting System will produce perverse incentives -- that is a voter with complete knowledge of all other votes might be better off casting a vote not reflecting their true preferences.

The good news is that some systems have much smaller regions where strategic voting is more optimal than true preference. STV is one of the systems with the smallest regions; so much so that in elections where the number of voters is much much larger than the number of candidates it becomes statistically unlikely.

@agterrane Edit profile / followers and subscriptions / Following hashtags.

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@tomruen STV is not hard when votes are hand counted, but when you get to hundreds of thousands of votes being cast the reality is you need machine counting, but having a human readable paper ballot is also highly desirable. I have not seen an example of a paper ballot that a machine can read, allows candidate ranking and obvious and user friendly.

Oakland, for example, uses The Grid, which has the down side of not allowing a voter to rank more than 5 candidates (limited by the number of columns) and has shown itself to over voting ( accidentally ranking the same candidate as 1st and 5th choice or ranking 2 candidates 3rd. for example).

@JonKramer My grandpa loved to tell the story from when he was a teenager of looping a strand of coil wire from the Model T around the seat in the outhouse and dropping the field when his uncle was in on the pot. The story always ended with "Tt was the first good [bowel movement] that cantankerous old [man] had got in years."

@AutismFather Hi Stuart, we're glad your here.

It is generally a good idea to start with an #introduction post that includes a bit about your interests and has some #hashtags that you like. Search other #introduction posts and start following people who seem to share similar interests.

@karanslade Same here only I am not allowed to nap while I'm at work. After this last year I have a new found appreciation for those people who spend a full day at their day job then give 2 or 3 hours to the church after they get done.

@patrickscheng@mas.to @johnclint could you be a bit more specific about what qualifies as partisan politics. Could I call out the lax gun laws that contributed to the ClubQ shooting or the awful conditions of asylum seekers as highlighted by GC79 in Austin? Would it be alright to post about the climate crisis and our duty to care for creation as addressed in GC80?

@hankg 84% of users are on the 1% of the largest instances. Those instances have generally moved in lockstep when it comes to defederating. They have also used a refusal to defederate the same instances they do as cause to cut ties with more open instances. Additionally this cabal also controls the list at joinmastodon.org and has removed instances like mine over disagreements, not on content moderation, but merely on the process by which content is moderated. In doing so the largest instances are in fact setting the rules for every instance that does not wish to be cut off from 80+ percent of all users.

A request for those posting about #WorldCup #WorldCup2022 please use CW for live sports so you don't spoil the game for those who cannot watch live.