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From: jmm@ecijmm.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: These new voting schemes
Message-ID: <903@ecijmm.UUCP>
Date: 26 Oct 89 03:50:57 GMT
References: <4771@ncar.ucar.edu> <15249.253f3716@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <37123@looking.on.ca> <4806@ncar.ucar.edu> <1989Oct25.051238.4241@alembic.acs.com>
Reply-To: jmm@ecijmm.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates, Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 25

In article <1989Oct25.051238.4241@alembic.acs.com>
    csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes:

>The NO vote threshhold, as has been pointed out repeatedly, suffers from
>the weakness of allowing a small group of people who disapprove of the
>*topic*, not the name, to block the creation of the group. Any mechanism
>that can be abused eventually will be. (I can see the memo now: "All
>AT&T employees WILL vote NO on comp.windows.motif!" [No slur of AT&T
>intended, of course.])


I'm sure that this has also been countered repeatedly.  Any group large
enough to block a topic by the 100 NO rule is also large enough to
block almost all topics by the current 100 excess yes over no rule.
Only a small number of cases would be *changed* by adding the 100 NO
vote rule.  Of course, as we get continually larger voting turnouts,
this will change.

It is unlikely that any topic would get enough yes votes to outvote a
(hypothetical) AT&T all-employee-no campaign under the current rules.
(If such an event occurred there would be a flaming backlash against
AT&T the likes of which we have never seen before - ** hypothetical
immanent death of the net predicted ** :-)
-- 
John Macdonald