So I have been debating on who to vote for in the new mods vote over here and it got me thinking about how I would prefer if I could vote for a few different accounts.
It reminded me of the video series by CPG Grey on voting, a good watch for more information (youtube link), and it got me wondering if for similar votes in the future if we should use something more similar to Single Transferable Vote?
As a quick example; if there are 5 candidates and 3 eventual winners, you rank your votes, but you also don’t have to list everyone. You could vote for 1, 3, or all 5, you just rank them in order of preference. Then when the vote tally comes, you just take any leftover votes from the person with the least votes and apply them to the voters second choice, etc…, until you have your winners.
I think it would really help in votes similar to the mod one, because that would let me vote for the 2-4 accounts I would be interested in seeing become a mod, without my one vote getting lost just because only 4 other people voted the same, or in cases where the vote is very close, if that makes sense.
It could be a little over complicated, but was curious if anyone else had similar feelings about the vote, or any future ones that are not just yay / nay.
Might be possible if we do voting on another platform? Something we can just click the boxes in order of preference? I had seen some discussion a couple days ago about using Decidum: https://sh.itjust.works/post/277452
As much as I would welcome a better voting system, taking it off platform brings all kinds of obstacles (technical, accessibility,…) and drawbacks (archived?, searchable?, discussion easy to find?)
And, by voting here, we may discuss our votes without any effort.
But, I think that with growth, the method of people commenting “aye” or “nay” is going to quickly run into issues. For one, how can we ever be sure a count is correct? Not saying out of nefariousness or anything, but even if you go “cmd/ctrl+f + aye/nay/other option” you still have the possibility of typos, the page not having loaded all the comments, and if we do restrict voting in the future or for specific decisions, that method would still need a manual review of potentially hundreds of comments and usernames.
Furthermore, others have suggested more open and democratic forms of voting such as ranking preferences, counting that by manually reviewing each comment is also not very feasible, but I do believe that system like these are necessary for the sort of democratic state the instance is trying to be.