[NCSG-EL-REF] None of the Above

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Jun 27 16:19, David Cake (dave at davecake.net) wrote:
> > On 26 Jun 2017, at 7:42 pm, Tapani Tarvainen via Election-reform <election-reform at lists.ncsg.is> wrote:

> > The reason most parliamentary elections and the like don't have
> > negative votes is that minorities should be able to get their
> > candidates elected even when majority doesn't like them.
> > Mojority of voters should get majority of seats but only
> > in proportion to the size of the majority.

> I don’t that is true at all. Our election is explicitly a
> muitiple simple plurality process.

I said "most", not all. Australia is an anomaly. :-)

OK, to be fair: ensuring minority representation is generally
a feature of multi-party systems.

But my point was that this is not an obvious point, and NCSG
charter is no explicit about it one way or the other.

> I think the position we should adopt should be one that is practical
> for use in our existing voting system, rather than based on
> philosophical goals that are not reflected in our current voting
> system. Changing our voting system is certainly not a bad idea, but
> it is probably out of scope and impractical for this discussion.

With this I agree 100%. Acute issue is what we can and should
do with our current charter. Systems requiring charter change
are of only secondary interest.

And however I try I can't make Robin's proposal compatible
with the charter. I would invite everybody to read carefully
paragraph 4.3 or the charter:


4.3 Election for NCSG GNSO Council Representatives (size, number, and
distribution of votes):

In the discussion below, N refers to the number of seats that need to
be elected. Optimally N will equal 3 seats in years with normal
rotation. Any number of reasons can cause this number to vary.

• NCSG members classified as “individuals” will be given N votes and
must assign 1 vote to each of N candidates.

• NCSG members classified as “small organizations” will be given 2N
votes and must assign exactly 2 votes to each of N candidates. 

• NCSG members classified as “large organizations” will be given 4N
votes and must assign exactly 4 votes to each of N candidates.


Despite the somewhat tortuous wording the meaning seems clear
enough to me.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen