OpenStreetMap
The anonymized ballots from yesterday’s OSMF board vote are available as a handy text file on OpaVote, so I decided to play around with them a bit. Here’s a breakdown of the rankings for each candidate:
I was also curious if people usually filled in the maximum of four slots, or left some of them blank. This is the result:
- 0 candidates: 11
- 1 candidates: 21
- 2 candidates: 124
- 3 candidates: 114
- 4 candidates: 219
So most people did indeed list 3 or 4 candidates! With STV, the third place can matter even if there are only two seats available, so it makes sense to fill it in. Nevertheless, I also looked more closely at the top two spots to see if there are any interesting correlations. Based on all ballots with at least 2 candidates, here’s the popularity of top two pairings (the order of candidate names carries no meaning):
- Heather/Joost: 166
- Paul/Joost: 136
- Paul/David: 46
- Heather/Paul: 43
- Joost/David: 33
- Heather/David: 33
If there are any other statistics you’re curious about, feel free to ask – if I find the time, I’ll be glad to run them. :)
Discussion
Comment from imagico on 10 December 2017 at 21:12
This indicates Heather was the most polarizing candidate (which most voters either voted on top of the list or as last/not at all) while Joost was the most broadly accepted candidate (which most voters put on one of the upper places of their list).
The really interesting information would of course be the geographic distribution of the votes. Unfortunately this is not possible to determine of course.
Comment from naoliv on 10 December 2017 at 22:12
If I didn’t mess how to interpret the data, I saw that the most voted sequence was:
10% of the votes with the same sequence is strange for me.
Then the second most voted sequence:
So the two most voted sequences didn’t include Paul.
Then the third most voted sequence had:
Fourth and fifth most voted sequence had:
ie, no Heather or Heather as the last option.
Comment from imagico on 10 December 2017 at 22:45
@naoliv - there was a recommendation by Nakaner to vote Paul-Joost-David(-Heather) - see http://blog.openstreetmap.de/blog/2017/12/wahlen-zum-vorstand-der-openstreetmap-foundation-2017-teil-2/
Since there were four candidates there are only 4*3=12 possible combinations (not counting empty positions) for first and second so 10 percent of the voters choosing one of them is not in any way strange.
Comment from naoliv on 10 December 2017 at 22:55
Oh my… only now I am seeing that I wrote “Dave” :-( Really sorry for this, David.
@imagico
But it starts to get stranger (for me, at least) if we count all the possibilities
432*2 = 48 it seems? (if we count the last option as one last candidate or empty vote)
Comment from Zverik on 11 December 2017 at 09:30
I am really interested in how close Joost was to being elected, and why he wasn’t.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 11 December 2017 at 10:09
The textual breakdown of the results on opavote can answer that. Joost got to the 3rd round, with 156.75346 votes, and was up against Paul with 158.29034. With 2 candidates & 1 seat, Paul won. Interestingly, there were 2.95620 votes discarded at that round, and they could have swung that round if those 2 people had voted for Joost.
Comment from imagico on 11 December 2017 at 10:22
Just to avoid misunderstandings - the 2.9562 exhausted votes are from people who have had only 1 or 2 people on their ballot so after Heather was elected and David eliminated they did not have any vote left to make a difference. So if those who had Heather/David on 1/2 or the other way round or only one of them and an empty ballot otherwise they could have, if they had added Joost to the bottom of their list, made a difference in the final results.