Half-Mind Rant


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Taking Issue(s) with InterHash voting

When there are exactly two choices in a vote / election it's easy (well, maybe not in Florida): count the votes and whoever gets half plus 1 wins, stop counting.

It just doesn't work that way when there are 3 or more choices. Mathemeticians (well, Hasher math geeks) know that there is no perfect voting system which always guarantees to best represent the will of the voters when there are more than 2 choices, as there usually is for Interhash. That is a provable mathematical fact.

Beginning with Cardiff Interhash, we went to a preferential voting system using the most commonly used ranked voting method: instant-runoff voting. It may not be a perfect voting system (none is) but it probably is the fairest, and easiest to implement/tally by Hash amateurs doing their best. It is also worth noting that previously, future InterHash hosts were not picked by all attendants but only by the GMs at Interhash. Of course, not all of these GMs were actual GMs but that is a dead issue now.

So we probably have the best voting system possible for choosing the next InterHash. Do we get the InterHash that most participants want?

At IH2006 almost 2000 Interhashers didn't bother to vote. That is no surprise. Where, except in 3rd world "elections" (farces) where the incumbent winner gets 99% or 100% (or more!) of the votes is voter turnout much more than 50%? It might be possible that Rumson could have won InterHash 2008 without even making a presentation (but of course, that is Rumson's unique talent - if you've never seen one of their InterAmerica's "bids" too bad for you). All anyone had to do was simply volunteer to fill out all of those 2000 unused ballots - too bad there wasn't a "write-in" slot.

But I wonder .. how many of you (who voted) had your minds made up before the bid presentations? At Chiang Mai, the ballot collection boxes were not made available until after the bid presentations were completed Friday night. Would more InterHashers have voted if they could have filled out and cast their ballots at the registration area starting on Wednesday, as soon as they got their ballots? Would that be better?

I wonder how many people have their minds made up before Friday night. By then, hopefully fairly drunk in the InterHash evening, they can finally cast their vote. Would allowing InterHashers to vote before the presentations be a bad thing? Would it increase the voter turnout?

In my (humble?) opinion, presentations are a good thing. Most Interhash hosts do not win on their first try and it does give InterHashers a chance to see at least a little bit of some elements of organization and real-time stress handling by the bidding committee representatives, as they deal with the always tricky audio / video and staging environment. In some of the bids in the 1990's, there was some hearty negative campaigning and bashing of other bids. That tactic has, through natural selection, - almost - disappeared. I did hear several people in Chiang Mai very turned off some bidder bashing in one of the presentations, it just isn't the way to go at InterHash any more, and that is a good thing.

Personally, I think the voting process used at IH2006 worked very well. I didn't see much of the "Give us your ballot and we'll give you a T-shirt" tries at vote buying that I saw in Cardiff by at least one bidder. It seems that Perth won without a runoff, the clear majority choice of the voters (who voted). How many votes did Perth win after 9:00 pm Friday night? Would the outcome be different if we had no formal presentations (which interrupt the dancing and other entertainment)? We may run a poll of people on this - would it help bid committees to know exactly what you want to know about their bid?

We welcome your comments on this topic or any other - Have a Rant? email me at Matthew@kleinosky.com and give us half your mind!

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