Achim Schneider schrieb:

Step 2: Determine the winner by polling preferences, same-level preference (ambivalence) allowed (eg. place 1 for logos C and D, place 2 for A and place 3 for B)

We recently had to vote for the new design of our university's website. This was done by asking every voter for an order of preference, with no equal preferences allowed. However, when the maintainer of the voting system was asked, how these answers are processed, he didn't know an answer. I think he finally converted positions to scores and added them. However, I suspect in chosing the scores for each position, he had an essential influence of the outcome of the election.

On Sat, 3 Jan 2009, Achim Schneider wrote:

Step 2: Determine the winner by polling preferences, same-level preference (ambivalence) allowed (eg. place 1 for logos C and D, place 2 for A and place 3 for B)

The only reasonable method of voting using this ranking data is one of the Condorcet methods. How you break ties doesnt matter much to me. Wikimedia, Debian, Gentoo, and Software in the Public Intrest all use Schulze method for what that is worth. However, I'm more concerned about who gets to vote and how many times do they get to vote. -- Russell O'Connor http://r6.ca/ ``All talk about `theft,''' the general counsel of the American Graphophone Company wrote, ``is the merest claptrap, for there exists no property in ideas musical, literary or artistic, except as defined by statute.''

On 3 jan 2009, at 17:33, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 3:15 AM, wrote:

...

On Sat, 3 Jan 2009, Achim Schneider wrote:

...

Step 2: Determine the winner by polling preferences, same-level preference (ambivalence) allowed (eg. place 1 for logos C and D, place 2 for A and place 3 for B)

The only reasonable method of voting using this ranking data is one of the Condorcet methods. How you break ties doesnt matter much to me. Wikimedia, Debian, Gentoo, and Software in the Public Intrest all use Schulze method for what that is worth.

Yes. Condorcet voting picks the best compromise and is IMO the way to do this - we won't all agree on the best logo, but at least we can pick the least disliked one. It doesn't need to be super sophisticated, just a box next to each logo where you can enter a rank in any range you like (1 being most preferred, empty boxing being equivalent to +Inf), allowing multiple entries to share the same rank.

Since there already is a condorcet voting package on Hackage, I made a simple (HAppS powered) web app where you can drag-n-drop your preferences. See http://github.com/eelco/voting/tree/master for the code (contributions more than welcome! Note, there's also a jQuery branch which has a bit different drag-n-drop behaviour) and http://code.tupil.com/voting/ for a live demo. It needs a bit more work but mainly a whole bulk of decisions, like * Limit voting, if so how? Email confirmation, IP based, vote once, once per day? * Maybe don't show the results until the contest is over? I, for one, very much welcome any benevolent dictator to make these decisions, because we can probably argue about pros and cons for months. Since Don started the contest (http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-December/051836.html ) and also seems to have some ideas about the voting process (http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-December/052257.html ), I hereby officially appoint him to lead to masses. (Does it work like that? ;) -- Regards, Eelco Lempsink