Safe as Milk

Maemo Community Council referenda: the results are in

The voting is now closed in the Maemo Community Council referenda on election procedures for the upcoming and future Maemo Community Council elections.

The provisional results, which will stand unless successfully challenged within the next 7 days, are as follows:

1. Which of the following criteria do you want applied to the Maemo Community Council elections to be held in March 2009?
   • 25 karma and 3 month old account (status quo) (71 votes)
   • No karma requirement, anyone with an account for more than 3 months
     may vote (64 votes)
   • None of the above (4 votes)

   139 votes were cast of an electorate of 601 (23%)

   We will maintain a 25 karma requirement for the next elections.

2. Which of the following criteria do you want applied to future Maemo Community Council elections?
   • 10 karma and 3 month old account (48 votes)
   • 25 karma and 3 month old account (status quo) (46 votes)
   • 10 karma or 12 month old account (22 votes)
   • No karma or account age requirement – everyone with a maemo.org account may vote (13 votes)
   • None of the above (0 votes)

   129 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21.5%).

   For future elections, voters must have a karma of 10, and have created their maemo.org account more than 3 months before the closing date of the election.

3. Which of the following voting systems do you want used for Maemo Community Council elections?
   • A single transferable vote preferential system (60 votes)
   • No change – single vote, with top 5 candidates elected (51 votes)
   • A reweighted range voting system (score candidates between 0 and 100) (13 votes)
   • None of the above (3 votes)

   127 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21%).

   Future elections, including the election to be held in a few weeks, will be by preferential vote, and will be counted using the Single Transferrable Vote system.

I will be modifying the Maemo election system (stolen borrowed from the GNOME Foundation) before the next elections to implement preferential voting, and we will likely be using OpenSTV to count ballots after the next election.