Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections January 2006/Iinag's proposals

I am not going to write a four-page prelude to my ideas; nor will I pretend that they have much of a chance of being implemented; but I thought that I may as well share them, in the hope that they may inspire something.

The current system is not so much a hybrid, but a glorified system of appointment. Under this system, despite the substitutive niceties, there is no guarantee that the candidates with the most community support, or that a candidate who would have been given a seat in an entirely elected system will not be dismissed for being 'problematic,' which is a very vague reason for dismissal.

From what I have seen, most dissenting proposals involve having an unlimited number of arbiters. That is fair enough, but if the length that it takes for Arbcom to come to a decision is a major gripe, adding more people to the mix will make it take longer to reach a consensus.

My proposal is that we have a two-part election to fill x amount of seats. Firstly, the current voting takes place. All candidates who achieve more support than opposition would go on to a run off vote. In this vote, Wikipedians (under the same suffrage rules as the first vote) would do one of the two following things:


 * Multiple vote: Wikipedians vote for all remaining members whose candidacies they approve. The x highest polling members would be duly elected.


 * Multiple preference vote: If there were eight remaining candidates, each Wikipedia would rank them one to eight, in reverse order of preference (8 given to the highest-considered, 1 to the lowest-considered); the x highest polling candidates would be admitted.

Although these suggestions would result in extra work, they would be democratic, and we need that severely: we cannot descend into an oligarchical situation where, in the end, a small group of people's opinions about Wikipedia's direction have more clout than those of everyone else.