[aur-general] voting period for Dave Reisner

[Xyne]

Loui Chang wrote:

> On Sun 05 Dec 2010 08:19 -0500, Shacristo wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > This is sort of what I was talking about in my previous mail about
> > > the refinement of the bylaws. Thirteen hours have passed since the
> > > beginning of the voting period and at this point according to this
> > > page:
> > >
> > > https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Trusted_Users
> > >
> > > There are thirty Trusted Users. Seventeen yay's have been cast and a
> > > simple majority has already been reached. We should amend the bylaws
> > > such that the voting period may end because no amount of nay's can
> > > change the outcome of the vote at this point. There is no reason for
> > > falconindy to wait another seven days to receive his Trusted User
> > > privileges. --Kaiting.
> >
> > 17/30 does not make a 66% quorum, so yes, the motion could still fail.
> 
> Kaiting is saying that even though quorum hasn't been met, that it's
> impossible for the vote to fail on the basis of opposition.
> 
> If the rest of the TUs voted nay, then it would be 17 aye vs 13 nay
> which would still be a majority for the motion.
> 
> How do they do it in real life if quorum isn't met, but support for the
> motion is enough that it shouldn't really matter.
> 

If quorum is required then the motion would still fail in that case.

Quorum really just prevents votes from passing with low participation, e.g. 5
participate and 3 vote yes... that would be a simple majority but clearly not
enough people to carry any real weight.

We could amend the bylaws to state that quorum is not required if an absolute
majority has voted to pass the motion (an absolute majority being more than
half of all active TUs). I think that makes sense because as it stands now,
voting against the motion or simply abstaining is completely meaningless. If
one were opposed to the motion, it would be more beneficial to simply not vote
at all and to hope that others do the same so that quorum cannot be established.

That actually applies in general to our application voting system. If you're
against the application, it would be more effective to simply not vote, which
seems wrong to me. Voting against the application should have some meaningful
effect and thus be different from abstaining. I wouldn't mind having some extra
clause that stipulates e.g. (#yes - #no)/#total >= x. The reasoning is that
even with a simple majority, if a large portion of the team is against an
application then it may be disruptive to accept it.

I realize that the argument against this will be that it isn't KISS and I'm not
really bothered about it either way. I'm just floating the idea.


Btw, I actually think it would make sense to have a script that accepts the
number of active TUs, and the number of votes to determine the outcome. It
would be completely unambiguous and amusingly geeky. It could also be tracked
with Git. ;)