[PSF-Community] Results of the PSF Board of Directors Election and Bylaws Vote

[David Mertz]

I can attest that the tie-break software deterministically chooses Trey
Hunner when tied with Paola Katherine Pacheco.  Any other member can
download the tool to verify the result by running:

532-psf-election % python break-ties.py -c "Paola Katherine Pacheco" -c
"Trey Hunner" -n 1
['Trey Hunner']


Effectively, we declare in advance the ordering of ties among each N
candidates who might tie for a relevant position.  In the case of this
election, we might potentially have needed to break ties to decide between
the 3, 2, and 1 year terms, but no ties happened to fall at those
boundaries (albeit Marlene Mhangami and Kenneth Reitz tied for the 9/10
spots... but since either of those go into the same term cohort, there is
no need to break that tie).

Even though Trey could know in advance of the election that he would be
selected in the event of a tie with Paola, this is actually of little use
for a candidate trying to "game" an election.  Trey would also, for
example, lose such a tie with Kenneth Reitz or Marlene Mhangami had those
occurred.  It's very unlikely that a candidate could devise a strategy to
come in last place, but tie with a some particular candidate the algorithm
would have them beat.  Moreover, three-way ties need not share any ordering
with a two-way between a subset of those three (and likewise for any N and
N-1).

As an illustration, had Lorena Mesa received fewer votes, simply adding her
to the contest between Trey and Paolo would happen to choose Paolo over
Trey (and  Lorena over Trey also, in this case):

552-psf-election % python break-ties.py -c "Paola Katherine Pacheco" -c
"Trey Hunner" -c "Lorena Mesa" -n 2
['Paola Katherine Pacheco', 'Lorena Mesa']


On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 12:48 PM, Ian Cordasco <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello everybody!
>
> The preliminary Board of Directors winners are:
>
> Van Lindberg
> Naomi Ceder
> Eric Holscher
> Jackie Kazil
> Paul Hildebrandt
> Lorena Mesa
> Thomas Wouters
> Kushal Das
> Marlene Mhangami
> Kenneth Reitz
>
> With Paola Katherine Pacheco and Trey Hunner tied for the 11th seat.
> Using https://github.com/python/psf-election/blob/
> 357fa903b8ba224fd2e5207eeb4208794567bf56/break-ties.py
> the tie has been broken and the 11th member Board of Directors is Trey
> Hunner.
>
> Ewa will contact the new directors with on-boarding information later
> today.
>
> This year there were 328 votes cast out of 630 potential voters. That
> means there was a 52% voter turnout for the election. This is the
> highest of any of the elections where I have served as Election
> Administrator.
>
> Further, in order for the Bylaws to be approved, we needed more than
> 51% of those who voted to approve the change. 51% of 328 is just about
> 168 voters and all bylaws amendments were approved by far more than
> that, thus they have all been approved by the membership.
>
> The results are available at:
> https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/e/PSF-2017-June-Vote
>
>
> Cheers,
> Ian Cordasco
> PSF Election Administrator
> _______________________________________________
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> PSF-Community at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/psf-community
>



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