STV for STV

Here in British Columbia, we're voting in a referendum on switching to Single Transferable Vote (STV) from the current First Past the Pole system.

I've been using STV for about 6 months now in the W3C WSDL 2.0 and WS-Addressing Working Groups. It's actually pretty darned cool at sorting things out. It can be gamed a bit so you need figure out whether to put in all your choices or not. Sometimes your 2nd choice can end up being tie-break with your first choice and the tie-break goes to 2nd choice - I had this one on a WSDL 2.0 vote on creating URLs from XML documents.

At the w3c we use this amazing irc 'bot called Zakim for our meetings. We run our meetings through Zakim. Zakim knows who's on the call, can take minutes by converting a particular persons irc comments into minutes, record action items, handle speaker queues, mute/unmute dial-ins, etc.

Paul Downey wrote an extension bot for doing STV called... wait for it.... chad. We use chad to set up the STV, and we can put in/change our votes, then watch as the stv process works through.

The style of STV that we use is called BC-STV, as it's the type that BC is voting on. There are many different types of STV. On a radio show a couple days ago, the people that were anti-STV were basically saying either: 1) it's too complicated or 2) it's the wrong type of STV.

Clearly, we need to allow people to pick which STV system to put into place, and just as obviously the best way to select which STV system is to use an STV! An STV for an STV. I'm not sure which STV system should be used for selecting the STV to be used, but let's not have an STV for the STV for the STV... It's turtles all the way down!

Or maybe not....

:-)