I now call this election into session. These will be the rules by which we abide:

1. The election will be a democratic vote, every person's vote counting as one vote. No more, no less.

2. Votes will be finalized at 10P.M. of tommorow.

Another rule is only stories submitted this month may be selected, but that isn't a problem as this is our first election.

Now vote, I say to ye! Vote!

Can I make a suggestion? Not all the members will have had time to read all the fics in the group. (I haven't, unfortunately.) That makes it hard to vote and a lot of us may want to only vote for our own. Perhaps you could see if a couple of people would volunteer to be judges? People who have time enough to read everything that's entered, and pick winners?

2907197

By vote once, I assume that you mean approval vote only once. Certainly, you do not mean vote for only 1 story, because that is not clone-immune and leads to Duverger’s Law:

If it has an overvote rule, limiting voters to vote for only 1 candidate, the side of the political parties more than the other side, the side with more parties will loose. This attrition leads to only 2 parties:

* 1 Party to the right of center
* 1 Party to the left of center

After the establishment the 2-party duopoly, any vote not for the lesser of the 2 evils is a vote for the greater of the 2 evils. As an example, Katherine Harris was only able to fix the 2000-Election in Florida because Nader siphoned off enough votes from Gore to move the results into the margin of fraud.

I shall give 2 hypothetical examples, 1 political and 1 using stories:

Let us suppose that we have an election of good versus evil. We have Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Adolf Hitler. 60% of the electorate is good, but 40% is evil. The 2 good candidates split the vote thus:

30% Abraham Lincoln
30% Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
40% Adolf Hitler

¿Is that a good result?

Let us suppose that we vote for stories. 60% of the readers love evil Pinkamena Diane Pie, while 40% of the readers love evil RainBow Dash. The stories are RainBowFactory, CupCakes, and Pinkamena Diane Pie makes PoundCake and PumpkinCake into literal cakes and feeds them to their unknowing parents. The results are:

40% RainBowFactory
30% CupCakes
30% Pinkamena Diane Pie makes PoundCake and PumpkinCake into literal cakes and feeds them to their unknowing parents.

¿Is this a fair result?

Approval voting allows one to approve multiple candidates. Here are the results using approval voting:

60% Abraham Lincoln
60% Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
40% Adolf Hitler
¡Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wins by a .1% advantage over Abraham Lincoln with adolf Hitler coming in a distant 3rd!

40% RainBowFactory
60% CupCakes
60% Pinkamena Diane Pie makes PoundCake and PumpkinCake into literal cakes and feeds them to their unknowing parents.

¡Pinkamena Diane Pie makes PoundCake and PumpkinCake into literal cakes and feeds them to their unknowing parents wins by .07% over CupCakes with RainBowFactory coming in a distant 3rd!

You might wonder how we ended up with the stupid overvote rule. Before paperballots, voters would go to the countyclerk and say:

“¡I vote for X!”

Voice-voting is called VoiceVoting. Voting for only 1 candidate in a single-winner eletion is called plurality because one can win with a plurality (less than a majority, or in other wards, one can win with less than half the votes).

Since the clerks had to record over 1 thousand votes on Election-Day, they usually refused to tabulate multiple candidates from each voter as a means of reducing their burden. When we switched to paper, we kept the silly overvote rule.

I recommend the choices are thus:

[+1] Approve
[0] Abstain
[-1] Reject

The abstain is for stories we have not read. Each voter gets approvally to vote only once per round. Given that some stories might be very close, I recommend multiple rounds like thus:

0. Approval Election
1. Approval RunOff
2. Top-2 RunOff.

For 1st and 2nd elections, we should use:

[+1] Approve
[0] Abstain
[-1] Reject

Stories with positive scores from the first approval election go onto the runoff Approval Election.

For the 3rd election, we should use:

[+1] Approve
[-1] Reject

At this point, we have only 2 stories left, so the voters should read both stories and come down 1 way or the other on which is best story.

¡We should use 1 voter, 1 approval vote for round!

2907197
2908364
2907431
Or...

Now bear with me here:

We can just all vote for my fic and be done with this silliness. Best voting plan ever!.

2908967

Or even better yet, we use approval voting like thus:

[+1] Approve
[0] Abstain
[-1] Reject

All approve your story and explicitly reject all other stories. ¡That will put all other Story-Writers in their place!

¡Bwhah! ¡Hah! ¡Hah!

To 2907431,

While that is a good idea, we lack enough active members to accomplish this. With our current number of members being 33, I just cannot see this plan as efficient. Yet. Perhaps when we attain a higher number of members we can select a few to be judges.

Also, new rule, one cannot cast a vote for his/her/its own story.

To 2908364,

Your idea of approval voting is a excellent one. I think it may be a little early to hold elections, with only three to four commenting members on the group. Should the election be cancelled?

2910835 Well as it stands I haven't even read a single fic in this group yet since I typically read maybe a fic a week and I have a massive backlog of fics to read whenever I get around to em.

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Election is cancelled! A little late for the announcement but yes it is cancelled. I'll work on a better system before next month's 20th. This month's stories will be eligible for next month's election. Remember to invite as many people that you can find to our group!