LJ Advisory Board election ends TODAY. Please VOTE!

[elements]

[It's been a long time since I updated - I'll post later about what's been up with me but yes, I'm still alive.]

The election for user representatives to the Livejournal Advisory Board ends TODAY, at 9pm Pacific/midnight EST. Please, please, take the time to vote.It's important that LJ sees strong user participation in this election, and we have a

Comments

[spare_change]

LMM is refusing to entertain any questions or comments from anyone outside her flist. This to me is completely inappropriate behavior from a candidate.

[elements]

Has she been willing to engage on the communities, esp the official community, with questions? I understand her hesitation to have comments with all the trolling that's been going on, though I agree with you that it's not ideal. I still find Jameth's involvement in the seizure icons vastly more inappropriate, though, so it's important to me that he not be the winner.

[spare_change]

Has she been willing to engage on the communities, esp the official community, with questions?

No. She hasn't appeared on any community. She's cut off every possible avenue of communication. She's been deleting/locking posts, screening comments, freezing threads, and now has locked comments to her flist -- and this pattern of behavior started long before the death threats or "trolling."

This is not someone I want to represent me. As I've said before, I would rather elect a lulzy asshole whom no one in their right mind should trust, than a current member of staff who already enjoys far more trust than either her platform or behavior merit.

(And I don't at all agree with how the seizure icons issue has been portrayed by fandom, but I'm not sure it's worth getting into right now. I will note, however, that I have chronic migraines that are triggered by photosensitivity (among other things) and I was on epilepsy meds for years to treat this. So my dismissal of this issue is not out of a lack of empathy, but simply because I don't

[elements]

Which is why this whole election just kind of sucks, in terms of how it's being managed, just everything. Even the instant runoff, which LJ isn't planning to run *quite exactly* like your normal instant runoff. I don't like being left with front-runner choices of someone I don't trust to take us seriously (Jameth) and someone I know many folks have real issues with (Jen).

Honestly, I can't wait for it to be over, however it does end, so the community can go back to enjoying this place rather than angsting over it (until the next time LJ does something horrifically inane).

[cos]

Ideally, if this were a real instant runoff vote, my first choice is lordandrei and my second is rm.

However, by the rules as they describe it, this is likely a sham. Whoever gets a plurality on the first round will win, and the second and third choices won't matter. There's a small chance that won't happen, but a much larger chance that's exactly what will happen.

So, vote your first choice as if it were the only vote, not as if it's the first round of an instant runoff.

Then vote your other two choices as if you're voting in an instant runoff, but knowing that those votes probably won't affect the outcome.

[elements]

There are really no words to describe how much that sucks. Not, at this point, that I'm surprised. Damn.

Why this "instant runoff" is broken

[cos]

As you know, the idea behind instant runoff is that in each round, as you eliminate candidates with the fewest votes, you slowly converge on a candidate who a majority of voters feel okay with. However, when you have 23 candidates and are only allowed to vote for 3, most people can't vote for all the candidates they're okay with, and worse, most candidates won't get the votes of all voters who are okay with them. That makes it much less likely that we can converge to a majority: ballots will be "exhausted" too quickly, not because the voters didn't have other candidates they might have approved of, but simply because there wasn't space on the ballots to list those candidates.

Adding up the number of first round votes right now, I get 25,346 voters. Assuming that everyone voted for 3 candidates (which I think is close to the truth), that means a candidate needs 12,673 votes to win. The current leader is legomymalfoy and if you add up all of her first, second, and third round votes you get 13,217, just barely enough. That means that depending

Re: Why this "instant runoff" is broken

[jiggery_pokery]

See, I've been saying exactly that. (For instance, bookshop quoted me saying that here.) Thing is, I'm now convinced I was wrong to say that - so you're wrong to say that, too. :-)

The reason why we were both wrong is that we haven't taken into account that a candidate doesn't need to get 50%+1 of all votes cast, they just need to get 50%+1 of all votes remaining - and, once a vote has all its candidates eliminated, it drops out of contention

Re: Why this "instant runoff" is broken

[cos]

No, I explicitly said "Assuming that everyone voted for 3 candidates (which I think is close to the truth)". If a significant number of people vote for less than 3 candidates, that may very well be because they realize that this system is broken, and only the first round matters, so that might make it seem to work, but would only be further evidence that it is broken.

If, on the other hand, people mostly do vote for 3 but the system only "works" because ballots are exhausted early in the process, such that the number needed to win shrinks rapidly... that is another terribly dysfunctional way this election fails: those ballots exhaust early not because the voters didn't favor more candidates, but because there was no room on their ballots to list them. We still wouldn't get a legitimate IRV result.

Re: Why this "instant runoff" is broken

[cos]

I just looked at the results and this is exactly what happened: legomymalfoy stayed within a few hundred of her initial 9443 through most of the rounds, until the last few rounds started exhausting ballots at a rapid clip. Round 1 had 25875 votes, with lego leading at 9443; Round 15 had 24,393 with lego leading at 9865. Then in the last 6 rounds, the number of votes dropped all the way to 19,445, and lego had 12,630 of those, a little less than 50% of the initial total.

So, first: this only "worked" because so many people abandoned their favorites and voted for a perceived winner, giving her a first round lead that mostly didn't change,

And, second: it depended on rapidly exhausting ballots in illegitimate rounds to bring a candidate to 50%, which turned out to be equivalent to stopping the rounds at the point where they'd still have been legit and falling back on the initial winner.

So many ways this was broken!

[disblfsuspender]

I voted for your slate. I think we're of basically the same mind on these issues, so I trust in your endorsements pretty much implicitly, and I'm glad you pointed to this, since I would have missed it what with the impending move and winding down at work craziness and so on.

[ursamajor]

From my observations of jameth's behavior over the last seven years, his behavior in this election is on par with the type of behavior I've seen from him historically and repeatedly.

I'm sure my six years off and on with Support biases me against him some, but I've seen him involved with/leading enough shitty drama that I don't understand why anyone is voting for him for any other reason but "the lulz." (And it annoys me that people *are* voting for a candidate for "the lulz.")

[jiggery_pokery]

I don't understand why anyone is voting for him for any other reason but "the lulz." (And it annoys me that people *are* voting for a candidate for "the lulz.")

Spot on, and I reckon that there are lots of people who feel likewise.