ANN: Ballot for Complementary PEP308 Ternary VOTE

[Manuel M. Garcia]

On 05 Mar 2003 00:18:30 -0600, Norman Petry <npetry at accesscomm.ca>
wrote:
(edit)
>> Uh, I never even read about any nomination period _beginning_.
>> 
>
>Damn.
>
>I posted it to Usenet, and had thought that the message would be routed
>to the mailing list as well, but it seems that something went wrong.  I
>now cannot find the message in the mailing list archives, or anywhere on
>the web!  Maybe that's why the response to the nomination period wasn't
>very good (or maybe it's because people felt that 21 choices was more
>than enough...)
>
>The strange thing is that I DID receive one early response via email on
>March 3rd, so at least some people must have received this message:
>
>ANNOUNCE: Complementary VOTE re: PEP 308 Ternary Proposal, Sun, 02 Mar
>2003 17:44:33 -0600
>
>I can only suppose that the message was cancelled by someone, although I
>can't understand why (it was long - about 500 lines, but I've seen
>messages double that length.  Is there some limit on message size that I
>violated?  I'm a beginner when it comes to Usenet).

Your message may have been canceled because it was misinterpreted as
an attempt to disrupt the voting.  Your intentions are obviously good
(obvious to me), but every element of the PEP voting has led to heated
discussions, and there is the possibility of someone trying to derail
the vote.  Your post should not have been deleted, but I would like to
be charitable and think it that person who did it had good intentions
too.

I am not even sure who might have the power to delete the post, if
anyone.  If it was only a Usenet glitch, it would not be the first
one.

I agree with Phil Hunt that the Condorcet voting method should have
been used on the "official" vote, if for no other reason than the
Condorcet system has been studied and "debugged" by voting experts
(and full analysis of all the special cases, etc.)

A programmer who wasn't an expert shouldn't attempt to create his own
ad-hoc encryption method.  For the same reason, I would use an
existing voting method before trying to come up with one of my own.

Happily, all this is trumped by the fact that this vote is not
decisive, and the person who will make the actual choice is also the
person with the most at stake.  Guido wouldn't let Python suffer a
deficiency, or grow a wart.

Manuel