Proposed constitution amendment (variant with separate election regulation): Use modern voting systems #1255

dpk commented 2026年07月11日 19:53:41 +02:00

This is a variant of a proposal for which another alternative PR exists.

This version of the proposal removes mention of the specific voting systems to be used at assemblies from the constitution, and includes the modern voting systems mentioned below in a separate election regulation. It requires two-thirds majority for amending this election regulation, as for the bylaws themselves.

See #1241 for more discussion of the actual voting systems proposed.

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This is a proposal for an amendment to the constitution of Codeberg e.V. (Satzung) for the next member assembly.

It proposes that, in the case of elections with more than two options (excluding the possibility of explicitly abstaining), future votes will be held using a modern, fair voting system:

1. For votes with more than one option where only one can be chosen, the Schulze method is used. This is a Condorcet-consistent voting method which uses a graph traversal algorithm to resolve paradoxes. It is widely used by FOSS/free culture projects including Debian, Ubuntu, Wikimedia Foundation ...

2. For votes with more than one option where more than one is chosen (e.g. elections to the presidium), the single transferable vote (STV) is used. This is also used in numerous non-profit associations worldwide, and in the election of very many real political bodies like parliaments and local district councils. It is a proportional representation system in which voters can rank individuals.

For information about the problems of the ‘majority-based’ voting system currently used in such cases, see e.g. this short explanation by C. G. P. Grey. There is no perfect voting system but these are widely used, generally agreed to be ‘fair enough’, and should be familiar to association geeks and voting geeks around the world ;-)

For the avoidance of doubt about how these methods are to be implemented, the Satzung will include references to specific papers describing the exact counting algorithm to be used by Codeberg (in mathematical notation and pseudocode in the case of Schulze, and in Pascal in the case of STV (it’s a paper from 1987)).

**This is a variant of a proposal for which another alternative PR exists.** This version of the proposal removes mention of the specific voting systems to be used at assemblies from the constitution, and includes the modern voting systems mentioned below in a separate election regulation. It requires two-thirds majority for amending this election regulation, as for the bylaws themselves. See #1241 for more discussion of the actual voting systems proposed. * * * This is a proposal for an amendment to the constitution of Codeberg e.V. (Satzung) for the next member assembly. It proposes that, in the case of elections with more than two options (excluding the possibility of explicitly abstaining), future votes will be held using a modern, fair voting system: 1. For votes with more than one option where only one can be chosen, the Schulze method is used. This is a Condorcet-consistent voting method which uses a graph traversal algorithm to resolve paradoxes. It is [widely used](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Usage) by FOSS/free culture projects including Debian, Ubuntu, Wikimedia Foundation ... 2. For votes with more than one option where more than one is chosen (e.g. elections to the presidium), the single transferable vote (STV) is used. This is also used in numerous non-profit associations worldwide, and in the election of very many real political bodies like parliaments and local district councils. It is a proportional representation system in which voters can rank individuals. For information about the problems of the ‘majority-based’ voting system currently used in such cases, see e.g. [this short explanation by C. G. P. Grey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo). [There is no perfect voting system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem) but these are widely used, generally agreed to be ‘fair enough’, and should be familiar to association geeks and voting geeks around the world ;-) For the avoidance of doubt about how these methods are to be implemented, the Satzung will include references to specific papers describing the exact counting algorithm to be used by Codeberg (in mathematical notation and pseudocode in the case of Schulze, and in Pascal in the case of STV (it’s a paper from 1987)).

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