This card tracks a proposal that's currently part of the Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey
The Wishlist Survey voting phase lasts until Dec 14th. After the voting has concluded, the top proposals will form the backlog for the Community Tech team to investigate and address.
See also T117127: Add support for the Meek STV method in SecurePoll and {118073}, which may overlap/duplicate.
Proposal:
SecurePoll extension is now used for ArbCom elections at English and Persian Wikipedias and WMF Board elections at Meta, all of which are multi-winner elections (i.e. multiple seats to be filled) but all the options that SecurePoll currently offers are single-winner voting systems. Approval voting, Schulze method, Range voting, and Plurality are all used to elect a single winner and using them to elect multiple winners is an abysmal choice. The conventional Support/Neutral/Oppose system widely used on Wikipedia is unprecedented in the real world — you cannot find any academic book or journal article on it so its possible disadvantages are unknown to us.
There is another problem: The English Wikipedia's ArbCom Elections and The WMF Board Elections usually end up with high turnout whereas elections on smaller communities, such as Persian Wikipedia, suffer from low turnout (about 50 voters). Low turnout requires a robust voting system to produce reasonable outcome. The Persian Wikipedia community is considering using alternative voting systems such as Meek STV which are not available in SecurePoll right now. I also propose to include various other methods available in voting software. I have also found an open source software which can be used to implement a proportional Condorcet method. You may want to see its algorithm. There is another software which covers various voting systems but is not free, namely OpenSTV.
4nn1l2 (talk) 23:40, 9 November 2015 (UTC)