From discussion on Slack last night:

There is a flaw with this method of counting because, as @sersorrel has already brought up, it only allows for voters to choose to reopen nominations (RON) for at most one seat in multi-seat elections. There are a few solutions to this:

1. Have as many RON pseudo-candidates as there are seats. (Apparently URY's solution)
2. Stop the counting if RON gets elected, leaving any remaining seats unfilled. (Suggested by @sersorrel)
3. Don't have a RON option, disallow defaulting, and count spoiled/empty ballots when calculating the quota. "Disallow defaulting" means making it so candidates absolutely have to reach quota to be elected and seats can be left unfilled by the end of the counting.

It was widely agreed that solution 1 would be hacky and confusing to voters.

I don't recall if YUSU require that we provide a RON option. Regardless, we should keep it. Voters expect it from other society and YUSU elections. Also, it is a more intuitive way for voters to express dissatisfaction with candidates (either a subset or as a whole) than solely relying on not ranking candidates and spoiled/empty ballots. As such, solution 2 is probably the best option.

For the most intuitive solution for voters, it could also be useful to incorporate parts of solution 3: count spoiled/empty ballots for the purposes of the quota and disallow defaulting. This would make not ranking candidates basically equivalent to ranking them after RON. Meanwhile it would make spoiling a ballot and casting an empty one equivalent to only voting for RON. However, these additional changes aren't strictly necessary and have some problems of their own, so I don't feel too strongly about them.

All in all, I recommend stopping counting if RON gets elected. Optionally and additionally, we could disallow defaulting and count spoiled/empty ballots in the quota.

I'm not likely to be able to get this updated, let alone passed by the committee, by the EGM this evening. I have, however, decided on what changes and clarifications I plan to make to the proposal. I plan to use this proposed system with said changes as Returning Officer this evening. For documentation and transparency here are the changes:

RON and spoiled/empty ballots

RON will get a single entry on the ballot. If, at the end of a round, RON has been elected then the counting will end. Candidates will not be allowed to be elected by default. That is, they must meet the quota to be elected. The droop quota will be counted using all ballots, including spoiled and empty ones.

Election rounds

This mainly clarifies how ties are broken.

If any candidates reach quota, the candidate with the highest score will be elected. If multiple candidates have the highest score and there are no more of them than seats remaining, then they will all be elected. If there are more of them then counting will end.

Unfilled seats

I would just like to clarify that I plan to update the proposal such that it doesn't talk about the counting "failing", only saying in certain circumstances that it will "end" for whatever reason (including all seats being filled).

If there are unfilled seats when counting ends, all the candidates that the counting elected will be considered elected to the position. As per the constitution

Computer counting

I will state explicitly that counting may initially be done by computer but must be done by hand for verification. (Although I don't know if I'll be able to update the program in time to use it this evening. 😬)

Results

Still not entirely certain whether the appendix should state what should be included in the published results. But I don't think it could hurt so I probably will include it if it's not too much hassle to figure out.

Another thing that needs to be dealt with: what do we do if a candidate drops out mid-race?

Another thing that needs to be dealt with: what do we do if a candidate drops out mid-race?

Assuming they drop out before the counting has started, my suggestion is that their first-choice ballots should instead go to their second choice during the set-up (and considered empty if there's no second-choice). After that they can just be treated like any other eliminated candidate during ballot redistribution (i.e. they get skipped over).

If they drop out after the counting has been started but before results have been confirmed/announced, then I think there are two possible solutions:

1. We can either rerun the counting with them excluded like above
2. We just go ahead with the results as they come out and, if they win, they can choose to resign immediately