So what’s unsuitable? So far I have yet to hear anyone say “if this governance PEP is chosen I’m quitting” and no one has said that IRV is bonkers-horrible such that any vote with it will be considered invalid. And pretty much any voting system that isn’t first-past-the-post is potentially “surprising” simply because of the complexity of the system. IOW there is no unsurprising result unless we use FPTP and I think no one really wants that (especially when the commons-like model will get hit the hardest due to vote splitting and that seems unfair whether you prefer that governance model or not).
OK, so people want something that helps stop that. IRV/Hare – yes, I looked at Ping’s pretty pictures 
– made sense to us in the room as it’s easy enough to explain and enough of us were familiar with it. Obviously it isn’t perfect, but no voting system is. So we went with what we know and wouldn’t penalize the commons-like PEPs.
But people continue to debate this. The problem is that there seems to be the following situation:
- @njs like Schulze/Condorcet with some tie-breaking rule developed by Debian
- @dstufft likes STARS
- @taleinat might like Borda (can’t tell where you actually fall beyond “not IRV” as the closest you said was you would “greatly prefer something like the Schulze method” without explicitly stating your preference)
- @cjerdonek likes IRV
- The rest of us who are fine with IRV because we don’t care or aren’t as worried about potentially odd results
IOW the detractors are still seemingly outnumbered by the silent majority. But more crucially, those against IRV seem split on an alternative to promote. So just like any other PEP we have passionate detractors, but as of right now there simply isn’t enough consensus among the detractors to have a groundswell of support to change the PEP. And as things currently stand we could potentially do a poll here on Discourse to see if there is enough support, but that’s FPTP, and right now the alternatives will vote split and it won’t go your way.
There’s also the point of trying to get this whole thing done. We need this locked down by Nov 1 so we can vote 15 days later and enough people are comfortable with the PEP as-is that moving that date for a debate we all know has no perfect solution and could go on forever doesn’t seem worth delaying a decision.
So here’s my suggestion to those who want a change away from IRV (and this is just me suggesting a potential way of getting what you want; I’m only one of nine co-authors on this PEP so no promises on my part this will even work):
- Agree among yourselves to an alternative (I personally would strongly suggest something simple to explain, e.g. Borda); you probably want this resolved ASAP
- Start a new topic with a poll between IRV/status-quo for the PEP, your proposed alternative, and “don’t care” with a deadline of no later than Monday, October 30 EOD to get results
- We can discuss the results of the poll on Tuesday
- If the discussion leads to the PEP needing an update then we can do so on Wednesday and have it locked down to announce on Nov 1 that it’s final and this is how we plan to vote starting Nov 16
Notice how I am not volunteering to do any of this as I fall into the “content/don’t care” camp for the PEP as-is and I’ve already done way more legwork than I should on this topic considering I’m still on my volunteer break (IOW please respect my time off, so no more private emails on this topic).