[Elections] A simple SqF board elections solution using SqP

[Peter Crowther]

> From: [...] Cees De Groot
> Is Condorcet the way to go? I looked a bit on Wikipedia, Condorcet
> seems to be for electing a single person as far as I could tell...

There are variants for electing multiple people.  All require a
completion rule.  http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html allows a
choice, including its own deterministic rules; we should pick a rule
ahead of time.

> I have setup a project called Agora (gosh what an original name)
> that's basically waiting for the definitive decision on the voting
> system to use. It'll be hardcoded for this election, to make
> everything easier :)

I'd love to.  However, I wonder whether we outsource this one, in the
interests of getting reliable software in the short period we have?

> BTW - there's another little task for this team - the candidate list
> still has two vacancies. And in order to let the voting system make
> any sense, it'd be good to have more candidates than seats, of
> course...

In a previous email, I suggested gathering candidates from the
community; candidates would require separate nomination and seconding.
This could be done in parallel with voter registration, if we were short
of time; nominations and secondings that turned out to be from
non-voters would be excluded when voter registration had finished (but
I'd suggest candidate registration continues a little longer so that
candidates who suffer from this have the option to find alternatives).

Again, we could do this via a Web site, or we could do it via an
archived mailing list.  For this election, the archived mailing list may
be easier to set up...

		- Peter