SUO: Re: Gathering Questions (No vs. Abstain) -- resend
[I'm resending this to SUO since John sent his response to this message to the SUO list. -FF]
At 20:31 2002-01-22 -0500, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Jon Awbrey's analysis is correct:
>
> JA: An explicit abstention does not count for or against the issue,
> but it does count toward the overall validity of the vote, much
> in the same way that the sample size N counts toward the validity
> of an experiment or survey, and anyone who later argues for the
> validity of the vote will use it in just this way, to say that
> a total of N persons participated in the vote (or survey or
> experiment). If N is very small, critics will have good
> reason to dismiss the significance of the vote (etc.),
> no matter what the outcome.
>
> Contrary to what Frank said, an abstention is *not* equivalent
> to a no vote -- because, as Jon pointed out, it counts equally
> strongly against both the yes position and the no position.
Here's a simple way of thinking about it. Let's say we have two rules:
Rule #1: Outcome is simply Yes > No
Rule #2: Outcome is Yes > No+Abstain
and Rule #2 is equivalent to Voters = Yes + No + Abstain, and outcome is Yes > 50% of Voters, because of simple transformation:
Yes > 50% of Voters
Yes > (Yes + No + Abstain) / 2
Yes*2 > Yes + No + Abstain
Yes > No+Abstain
Thus, Abstain responses in Rule #2 count as No votes.
> In the case of the SUMO vote, the high number of abstentions means
> that many SUO participants believed that it was premature either
> to accept or to reject SUMO as a candidate document.
>
> Bottom line: An abstention is a vote for postponing a decision
> until more information becomes available. It is a valuable option,
> and we should respect it.
You can't attribute motives to the votes in this vote and most other votes (especially, when complex reasoning is reduced to three responses: Yes, No, and Abstain). Thus, you can't infer that "the high number of abstentions means that many SUO participants believed that it was premature either to accept or reject SUMO as a candidate document".
The only claim that you can make is that there was a slim majority of those casting a vote (Yes, No) ... and that the Abstain responses clearly did not want to support the motion, nor did they want to oppose the motion.
You can't infer that Abstain meant "thought the document was premature". Yes, some people may have thought the document was premature and voted Abstain, but some people (e.g., Yours Truly) voted Yes who thought the document was "premature as a standard", and some people voted Abstain who had no particular opinion on the maturity of the document.
-FF
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