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["Daniel Quintiliani" <danq AT runbox.com>]

Hi,

A number of people were unhappy with the recent vote on reintroduction of
proposals. Many had proposals such as multiple rounds of voting, which were 
very confusing. I attempted to simplify things by taking only multiples of 3
up to 12, 1 month, and no change. There were also two protest votes by people
who wanted other amounts of months and were not willing to compromise.

In major elections in my country, you start out with many choices between
candidates, who drop out until one candidate from each party remains, and then
one wins the election. The only exception to that is in the extremely rare 
case
when a third-party candidate is relevant. Third party candidates serve no 
purpose but to (1) encourage the major party canidates to adopt their views 
and/or (2) split the vote and help the other side win.

I assumed that with this vote, people would rally behind a single option as
time went on. This did not happen, as angry voters cast protest votes
such as "C->D 4 months" and "<invalid>"

Shortly after I put the issue to vote, I was discussing with vvande and others
on Discord a European style of voting called "instant runoff voting" in which
there's less of a need to compromise. In this case, one votes for as many of
the options as they choose, in order of preference. There are multiple rounds
of voting in this case, in which the each round would remove the last place
option, until only one option remains. If any option has zero votes in a
round, they would also be removed.

Votes are then counted in this manner:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRV_counting_flowchart.svg 

I didn't want to tamper with the election so I stayed quiet until it ended,
with plans to reintroduce with instant runoff voting if no changes were made. 

So as no changes have been made, I will use this same vote, instant-runoff
voting, this time with 4 and 8 months added back to the choices, and with the 
effective date pushed ahead to February 2019. The initial vote will start on 
the 24th and last through the 31st.

In addition to the original proposal, we have had proposals such as
.free/.libre/.liber/etc which were not limited to yea/nay. Thus unless the 
.free
vote and others are illegitimate, there is nothing prohibiting instant runoff 
voting, and this 
proposal can be brought to a vote.

Any comments before the voting starts should go in this thread.

--

-Dan Q