Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Borda Count

[Tim Mensch (tim-coho-l]

Sharon Villines wrote:
> On Feb 13, 2008, at 12:15 PM, Tim Mensch wrote:
>
> > I know that Pleasant Hill Cohousing in California uses it. It's really
> > the best voting system to use, in that it's good at finding  
> > "consensus"
> > candidates as well as being easy to implement.
>
> Where do you start? Borda allows you to use a weighted voting system  
> to select the candidates who are most acceptable to all community  
> members -- not to the majority. But which people do you vote on to  
> begin with?
Your approach (voting on everyone and not asking whether they want to 
serve) is very sociocratic, and I'd be interested to know whether such a 
system works.

At Pleasant Hill, the process was to collect nominations for positions 
as a first pass, and then folks could decline nominations. My wife was 
nominated for /all/ the elected positions the first time around, for 
instance, and she decided to only run for a couple. I was nominated for 
a few myself, though I declined to run for any--and even in a system 
where I was elected without being able to say whether I wanted to run, I 
would have still declined.

The sociocratic system was designed to be used in a business 
environment, and I think it probably excels there--where everyone at the 
business really is putting in 40 hours a week accomplishing some clearly 
defined common goal. In cohousing, you'll have people who might be quite 
qualified for a job, but simply not have time for it, since they're not 
de facto committed to spending 40 hours a week on cohousing--in fact, 
unless they're retired they're probably spending at least 40 hours a 
week doing something else.

My guess is that electing someone who doesn't have time to do a job may 
not be useful--though in the Borda system you can always delete that 
candidate and see who gets elected in his/her place. But if you go 
through a few people this way, and you have everyone pick 10 out of 50+ 
members for each role, I'm guessing that the system would end up too 
diluted to really make sense or operate as intended. It's easier to rank 
3-4 people than to pick 10 out of 50.

Tim

--
Tim Mensch

Currently at Wild Sage (Boulder, CO): http://www.wildsagecohousing.org

Founding member of Tumblerock, a Boulder, CO area community in its forming 
stages: http://tumblerock.org