On Thu, 2006-08-10 at 20:24 +0000, Ferris McCormick wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-10 at 21:11 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:03:26 +0000 Ferris McCormick <fmccor@gentoo.org>
> > wrote:
> > | So the "glue" is rather easy; problem is the specific balloting
> > | method. STV supports several protocols for selecting some number of
> > | winners from a list of candidates, but Condorcet is not among them,
> > | because Condorcet is really a "pick single winner" method.
> > 
> > All you need to do is delete the single winner from the election and
> > repeat the process.
> > 
> 
> True.  I was hoping no one would notice, however, because that gets
> tedious  (although once you have the ballots, it can be automated to a
> large extent).  At some point, we should re-examine policy and run some
> controls to see if a voting method more closely designed for what we are
> actually doing might be more appropriate.
> 

Thanks to a pointer from Jan Kundrát, I have been able to build a master
STV ballot from last year's council ballots.  I had previously failed to
note the "Eliminate candidates..." option to STV. But having noticing
it, I am able to follow Ciaran's suggestion and run repeated Condorcet
cycles over last year's ballot until 7 members are selected.  Running
STV in this manner selects the same council as we did elect.

Total effort --- perhaps 15 minutes work for a new election (I have
scripts which will build a master ballot from a collection of individual
ballots, and from that the effort is minimal --- say, 60 seconds total
if you are slow.)

So, my "tedious" comment is someplace between misleading and wrong.

I note in passing that NO voting method designed to select a set of
several winners at once for this sort of election chooses quite the same
winners as repeated application of Condorcet does. The deterministic one
do agree with each other, however, on a slightly different set of
winners.  At some point after this year's election we should follow up
on this.

Regards,
Ferris

-- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)