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lovingbothThe Founding Meeting for the pan-Europe organisation Bi+ Europe saw almost everyone agree about almost everything. Yay! There's some legal work to do, but it should start up in April next year.
What were the main disagreements? There were five things that more than a couple of people voted against. Not in the order they were in the draft documents, they were...
The original proposal was effectively first-past-the-post AKA 'simple plurality'. When you have two options, it's fine. When you don't, it's not.
Here, it's being proposed that five (or four) people are elected onto a board at once: everyone gets five (or four) votes, casts them for up to five (or four) people, and the five (or four) with the highest number of votes win.
Imagine you have a hundred members, ten candidates, and - for whatever reason - 51 of the members want the same five people to win, and 49 want the other five to win. With this system, the first group get all their five elected and the second group get no-one. Is that OK? Not with almost half of your membership!
Imagine that 60 of them want any of seven or eight people to win, but 40 all want the same five different people. Depending on how the votes come out, it's quite possible that those last five win every place as the voting for the others is 'split'. Is that OK?
Imagine that you'd like candidate A most and candidate B not quite so much in an election to select five. If you think the result is going to be tight, there is an incentive to not vote for candidate B - if they come fifth, beating A into sixth by one vote, then your vote for them helped stop your first choice winning.
It would be nice if there was a perfect way to pick between more than two options, but alas it turns out that it's impossible to have one. But we can do a lot better than the suggested system!
The argument in favour of it is that 'parties' / 'blocks' simply won't arise. My answer to that is that they might not happen formally, but if you have 60% of the votes from one group of countries with people knowing each other, for example, getting an unrepresented 40% could easily happen.
After some discussion before, during and after the online pre-meetings, Single Transferable Vote (STV) was added as a possible alternative. Voters put their choices in order, and it's then someone else's problem to sort it out so most people are as happy as they can be with the outcome. With one choice to be made, it's very simple to the point that it has a different name: Alternative Vote (AV) or Instant Run-off Voting. If no-one has a majority of votes, you look at the next remaining choice of the people who voted for the one currently in last place, and give their vote to that. Repeat until one does have a majority.
With more than one choice, STV gets more complicated - if the winners in any particular vote get more votes than they 'needed' to be elected, their 'surplus' gets shared amongst those voters' next choices in calculated fractions of a vote - but this is why we make computer programs do it.1
For the first two examples above, STV is very likely to result in the majority seeing three of their preferred candidates win and the large minority seeing two of theirs. In the third example, whoever you have as your second choice does not hurt the chances of your first choice.2
There's even long precedent for using it at Bi+ events! At BiCon 2002, people brought along 20 minute CDs and which were played one evening was decided by an STV vote. I doubt that anyone was very happy with everything, but everyone was happy with at least one of the twelve that got played and most people liked most of them.
When the sessions that were looking at the proposals in detail voted against STV, I knew it would fail to pass when it came to the final vote.3 In the end, it was 26 votes to 7 in favour of simple plurality. I was quite pleased it got seven votes given there was no discussion on this at the actual session that made the decisions. It also had the second highest number of people voting 'abstain', six.
But 'how to get several winners' is not the only type of election where simple plurality fails as we'll see...
Oh, another aspect of the adopted system I'm not completely happy with is 'you need to get 20% of the vote to be elected, otherwise there's a new vote'. ILGA Europe uses this system but the real solution to the problem it wants to fix is that you just have a 'none of the remaining candidates' option on an STV ballot. From memory, I am much more alone on this one even though the more candidates you have, the more likely it is to happen with simple plurality.
Or '.. and you thought there was already enough electoral system geekery for one post' :)
As mentioned, there had earlier ended up being three possibilities for the maximum number of non-bi+ identified (at the point of standing) people on a board of up to nine people: none, one or two, or 'a minority'. OK, we want to pick one winner from three options, how do you do that?
What I thought would happen based on what someone said was that they'd be three 'do you want this option' votes and the one with the highest number of 'yes' votes would win. There are of course problems with that: there is an incentive not to vote for your second choice just in case it narrowly beats your first choice as a result, for example.
Or it might have been 'have a vote for each one in sequence, but if one gets a majority, it wins and we don't bother to have any remaining votes'. It's how many places deal with incompatible amendments to motions, for example: if amendment one passes, amendment two etc automatically fail.
Here the problem is that the ordering of the votes is critical and, with an informed electorate, can decide the outcome. Imagine you have three choices and you rank them BAC, but the vote is in ABC order. Do you vote in favour of option A? Mmm, it depends on whether you think B will win what becomes a two way fight with C if A fails. If yes, then you vote no - you don't want A to win and there to be no vote on B. If no, then you vote yes - you'd prefer A to win than C.
But it's not just you voting - if it is, then it's a dictatorship and, in one sense, things become simpler! What does someone who ranks them CAB but thinks that B would beat C do? They vote for A, because they'd rather have their second choice win than their third. Combined with the people who want A to win anyway, it will often win comfortably just because it is first to be voted on. Even if most people would prefer something else.
What actually happened was a single vote with the three choices and option with the highest number of votes won. None of them got an overall majority:
Everyone has to have a bi+ identity: 13 votes
On boards of 5+ one and on boards of 8+ two can have a non-bi+ identity: 7 votes
Any minority can have a non-bi+ identity: 18 votes
So there's a clear winner under simple plurality, but most people wanted something else. And given you could get up to four non-bi+ identified people on the board, most people wanted something very different.
I would suspect that anyone who voted for 'everyone identifies as bi+' would prefer 'only one or two don't have to' to potentially more than that. Similarly anyone who wanted 'a majority identify as bi+' would very probably prefer 'one or two don't have to' to 'everyone identifies as bi+' none.
But here, the middle option got the fewest votes and so would have been eliminated first in a STV/AV election, even though more people (very probably) would have had it as their first or second choice than either of the other two.
Can we fix that? Yes we can!
A Condorcet system - named after an 18th C French aristocrat who wrote about it some years before dying in a revolutionary prison, although the idea dates back to the 13th C - looks at everyone's preferences and treats them as a series of two way votes. In a three way contest, it'd be A vs B, A vs C, and B vs C. If there's one that wins all of its matches, it's the winner.
Here, there is! If I'm right about people's second preferences, 25/38 people prefer 'one or two' to 'none' and 20/38 people prefer 'one or two' to 'minority'. Fewer people would have been very happy because their first choice won, but everyone would have been happy that their first or second choice did.4
Of course, it's not perfect either - depending on the votes, there may not be a single 'Condorcet winner' and if not, there are a variety of ways of sorting it out - but for an organisation whose section on voting starts "Whenever possible, resolutions of the General Meeting should be taken by consensus", I suggest that Condorcet is an ideal fit for picking one option out of many. Wikipedia seeks to work by consensus and it uses a Condorcet system ('Schulze') for voting when necessary, for example, as do a bunch of other community projects.
If you want more of this sort of thing, a 1990 paper called Mathematical theory of elections came up with what I think is a wonderful (another author called it an "absolutely evil example") vote where given a particular set of fifty five people's preferences, six different common methods of picking a single winner from five options produce six different results.5
With the exception of the above, there aren't any 'reserved places' or similar concepts anywhere. So if there's something coming up that particularly affects one segment of the community, they can ask for an additional vote. Whether or not to give it would be the very first thing at a meeting and, if successful, they get it for every single vote at that meeting whether it's relevant to the reason for wanting it or not. I'm relaxed about the general principle, but I do think that last bit is a bit silly.
It won by 30 votes to 5, with seven people voting 'abstain', more than for anything else.
Speaking of extra votes, one thing that wasn't as controversial as one might expect6 was the idea that each time you have a vote, you effectively call for two separate ones: one for individual members and one for organisational members. You then alter the results so that the value of the latter is exactly twice that of the former before adding them together to see who the actual winner is. The idea is that groups probably 'represent' a bunch of people and their votes should count more. Great, but people can be voting both as an individual and there representing a group so things take longer. It'd also be amusing if there were many more groups voting than individuals - the latter's value would have to be boosted!
Remember the area being "Council of Europe countries plus some Central Asian ones"? It turned out later that one of the latter had what many consider its wrong name, and oh... what about Russia and Belarus? They'd been in the original 'here's a list of countries' definition, but turned out to be excluded from this one.
I knew Russia had been suspended from the Council of Europe following their annexation of the Crimea in 2014, but I'd forgotten they've since been thrown out. And it looks like Belarus has never been a member.
On the one hand, there were certainly Russians in exile there who wanted in, but on the other hand, around a quarter of the people who voted didn't want the two countries included. There are obviously lots of reasons for almost everywhere in Eastern Europe7 to not want Russians anywhere near anything, but with no discussion in that session, I don't know why so many were actively against in this context.
There were two options: limiting it to people with sexual and romantic attraction to more than one gender or adding emotional attraction and/or behaviour. (In both cases, it's acknowledged that they may not have a bi+ identity.)
I very much wanted the second one. The sessions that chugged through the whole thing didn't give a recommendation - I can't remember if there wasn't a vote at it or if it was too close to say 'here's our recommendation'. In the end, the expanded one won by 26 votes to 14, with no active abstentions.
Again, thanks to some very deft work during the entire process before and during the meeting, none of these led to shouting matches, and I don't think anyone went away going 'Well, that vote went the wrong way, I'm not going to take any further part...'
Thanks once again to Governance Leader Soudah, Governance Analyst Demet, and polishing sessions chair Darienne for that work.
1. I have done STV votes by hand in Student Union elections in the early 1980s. It is doable; you just don't want to have to do it, and it was the one reason I was glad that turnouts tended to be low in the elections in question.
2. In small elections, ties are rare in STV but can happen. In that case, it can make a difference how high you put someone even without the vote being 'transferred' because there are still people in the running above them. I once won a place on the Liberal Party's Federal Executive because I'd put the person I'd tied with third on my list of preferences, and they'd put me second.
3. Following the formation of a coalition government in the UK in 2010, there was a referendum on adopting AV. It's not a good way of electing a Parliament, but it's better than simple plurality, known in the UK as 'first past the post' even though the 'post' isn't fixed... It wasn't just most of the two largest parties campaigning against it that meant I knew it would lose, it was when the Electoral Commission published the booklet on it that went to everyone and managed to make 'put your choices in order and if your current preferred choice is last, we use your next one, until someone gets over 50% of the votes' so complicated that I could barely understand WTF they were saying.
Here, there was a tiny bit more detail on how STV works than I thought was strictly necessary, but I am not crying foul...
4. Note it doesn't matter what the second preference of the people who voted for 'one or two' is, or even if they had one or not: the outcome of 'none' vs 'minority' is not going to affect its two wins.
5. Five produced a (different) single clear winner and another produced a two-way tie. As well as simple plurality, AV, and Condorcet, there's the French Presidential style (if no-one gets a majority, the top two go into a runoff), Borda (you allot more points to people's first choices than their second etc and see who has the most overall), and approval voting, the one that produced the tie (you can vote for as many as you like, highest one wins). That last one was added by the later book, I think.
At some point, I'm absolutely going to put the table of votes and the various results on a t-shirt...
6. Well this one, anyway.
7. The only possible exception I can think of is Albania, whose horrific situation was more home-grown / China's. And we didn't have anyone saying they were from there.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-14 10:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-14 11:25 am (UTC)Under the name 'Armenia', that's in the Council of Europe.
It was Kyrgyzstan, which had been listed under its apparently official name, Kyrgyz Republic.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-14 02:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-18 12:15 pm (UTC)Apparently, electoral systems count as 'economics' or at least that's what Arrow won the Noble Memorial Prize in for his work.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-18 01:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-18 11:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-11-18 12:13 pm (UTC)Where would we be without backroom carve-ups? So much better than democracy :)