Talk:Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Updates/Member change

How was STV applied

Hi @KVaidla (WMF) and Abbad (WMF):,

I have just noticed this announcement, and looks like STV was applied in a wrong way here.

According to Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Set Up Process#Additional appointment and replacement, Election process is set up to provide 2 alternates for elected candidates.

As it says that a process is set up, the correct way to do it would be the following:

• eliminate votes for Alice from the ballots dump
• and rerun the STV (known as countback)

It looks like that the method actually used blindly selected the last eliminated candidate (even the penultimate one due to the constraint). However, this method is incorrect and is not used in practice (see en:Issues affecting the single transferable vote#Vacancies for methods used in actual elections). It is incorrect in almost completely ignoring voters supporting the candidate who resigned (their votes actually count for only 10%).

I implemented an STV on the ballot damp after eliminating Alice, and the result would have been different: Daria should have replaced Alice. This is even intuitive: Alice and Daria are both European women with significant chapter involvement, they likely appealed to the same voters.

Here are the final stages of my STV implementation:

26. (26 uneventful stages, slight order changes but nothing major)
27. Quota 112.25, Sadik eliminated with 35 votes
28. Quota 110, Ad eliminated with 41 votes
29. Quota 109.25, Anass eliminated with 43 votes
30. Quota 108.25, Galder and Érica eliminated with 46 votes each
31. Quota 102.25, Pharos elected with 103 votes
32. Quota 102.225, Yair Rand eliminated with 49.04 votes
33. Quota 99.93, Anne elected with 106.12 votes
34. Quota 99.71, Jamie eliminated with 56.28 votes
35. Quota 95.71, Reda eliminated with 68.28 votes
36. Quota 90.54, Chris eliminated with 74.03 votes
37. Quota 86.48, Nosebagbear elected with 91.05 votes
38. Remaining candidates are Michał, Daria, Ravan, Ciell and Titodutta. As Titodutta is last among them and cannot be elected (two enwiki seats are already used), Michał, Daria, Ravan and Ciell are elected.

Now, I cannot guarantee my implementation is exactly the same as the one used by WMF, I think I slightly differently redistribute votes between already elected candidates. Thus my results definitely need to be checked. However, one thing is clear: many of Alice's votes actually go to Daria who survives in the race significantly longer.

It is thus clear that an incorrect process led to an incorrect result. While Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Set Up Process#Additional appointment and replacement requires to set up an election process, a (too) quick conclusion based on previous results was made instead. This resulted not only in a democracy bias (outcome not in line with voters' choice) but also in a diversity bias (the community would have actually chosen a woman with a similar background to replace a woman, we got a man instead).

I think these biases need to be addressed, and lessons have to be learned as well. Thanks — NickK (talk) 02:42, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

I haven't seen a dump yet of the raw (anonymized) ballots, which I would like to rerun STV. Are those still available? They were with the last board election. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 03:53, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ad Huikeshoven: Yes, it is available in Movement Charter/Drafting Committee/Submitted voting harks — NickK (talk) 21:55, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 08:54, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

With the dump of votes and use of the STV script written by Lorenzo (as was used for ASBS) in the past, I reran. I confirm the initial results. To replace Alice, there should indeed be a recount. I would suggest to not only remove Alice, but also the members already on the committee, and all candidates who can not be elected due through constraints. The STV would be for a single seat. Then Daria would beat me in the last round and get elected. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 15:16, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Eliminating all is an incorrect implementation: in this case you count twice votes of those who supported someone already elected (in your case particularly many people supported Ciell but had you as a lower-priority choice). However, as both implementations agree that Daria should be this replacement candidate, the result is quite clear, and I wonder whether @KVaidla (WMF) and Abbad (WMF): had an opportunity to look into it. Thanks — NickK (talk) 23:17, 31 March 2022 (UTC)