The race is now closer than ever as Lauda gains a narrow lead in the primary vote, but it's not enough to overcome the preferences for Mitchell. A mere 5 votes stand between the top two candidates. Even though the election is nearly half over, it's still anyone guess who will win.

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Most of them weren't counting anyway. What difference is this rule expected to make?

You what? Are you sure you're cut out to be a global moderator?

Once the election is over, I plan to give a more in-depth analysis, as well as count the results by different methods to see if any discrepancies arise (which they might, given how close this race is). Right now, I'm only focusing on the two candidate preferred vote since that's the standard way of announcing the result of an instant run-off election. That Wikipedia article starts with "In Australian politics..." because hardly anyone else uses instant run-off voting. I don't understand why. It's perfectly simple:



You start out with a large number of candidates (yes, that's a real Australian ballot paper with hundreds of candidates*), and tally the #1 votes for each one. Whoever gets the fewest votes is eliminated. In a normal run-off election, a second (and third, etc.) election is held with that candidate omitted from the ballot, but in the "instant" version of the scheme, we can skip the extra elections by taking all the ballots that voted for the loser and counting them as a vote for their #2 preference. The process is repeated until only two candidates remain, and the one with the majority wins. (If one candidate has a majority at an earlier stage (possibly even in the primary), you can stop counting if you're lazy, since that candidate is guaranteed to win in the end, but you don't know by how much.)

A ballot is said to be "exhausted" when it voted for an eliminated candidate and it expressed no preference for any of the remaining candidates. In the end, all ballots are a vote for the winner, the runner-up, or nobody. This allows voters to safely vote for unpopular candidates while still having a say in which of the most popular candidates is elected. This is also why Australia has slightly more than two parties.

The two candidate preferred vote is the result after all preferences have been distributed to the final two candidates. While it doesn't show how much support there was for every candidate, it shows who the winner is and by how much, ie, exactly how many extra votes the runner-up would have needed to win.

*Actually a Senate ballot, which uses the single transferable vote system, which is basically the multiple-winner version of instant run-off and is even more complicated (once the first winner is found, they're eliminated, votes for that candidate are weighted by how much the winner won by, and the whole process starts all over again to determine the next winner). Australia's lower house ballot papers aren't quite so ridiculous.

You're currently in fourth place, with 15 votes (14 primary, 1 second preference). Since you're out of the running, everyone who voted for you had their vote flow to their next preference (except for one voter who had no next preference and had their ballot exhausted) - 10 of your votes went to Mitchell, and 4 to Lauda.

Daily update:

The primary vote is a dead heat, and Lauda still trails by 7 votes after preferences. Especially telling today is the enormous number of exhausted ballots, almost entirely from the sudden and concerning influx of HostFat voters. Most of them didn't even have a #2 preference, and so, even though they have the numbers to decide this tight election, they won't. Would it be electioneering to remind HostFat supporters to vote for more than one candidate, otherwise their vote won't count if their #1 choice doesn't win?

Also, I'm still counting these votes by hand (as an Australian, I know how to do that), even though the TCP is now shown on the public spreadsheet. Consider it an independent audit.

EDIT: Typo.

All the candidates are excellent, in my opinion. There's no choosing the lesser evil in this election. It's a refreshing change.

Any election is bound to have a certain number of people voting for stupid reasons, and everyone involved (should have) expected that going in. As long as the majority of voters are sane there should be no issue (and if you don't have a majority of sane voters, you have a problem democracy can't fix). In any case, it's not anyone's place to question the voters' motives.

Incidentally, Lauda now trails by 11 votes in the TCP, as more Dabs voters prefer Mitchell, widening the gap.

Yes.

Votes that didn't count because they had no preference for the top candidates (ie, every candidate they did have a preference for was eliminated). This situation is impossible in full preferential voting (where each vote must rank all the candidates) but we didn't do that, so some votes are bound to be "wasted" this way (though not nearly as many as in a FPTP election).

The results so far after preferences:


Although the primary votes are nearly evenly split between Lauda and Mitchell, Mitchell edges ahead on strong preferences from achow101's supporters. Dabs' supporters are a bit more evenly split, but still lean towards Mitchell. It's still a tight race with Lauda trailing by just 7 votes in this epic election which may or not end up making any difference whatsoever.

Are we allowed to comment on the ongoing TCP count and trends in preference flows? Theoretically it's public knowledge, but people may be too lazy to count preferences on their own and could conceivably be influenced if someone does it for them.

1. Lauda
2. mprep
3. achow101

What units is that in? Millimetres? It must be, to fit that diameter between your legs. Though the length seems rather inadequate in that case... How are those proportions even supposed to work in the first place, whatever units you're using? Why would you want a penis shorter than its own diameter? Did you even think this through at all?

It's no big surprise that people on this forum are celebrating, as they're the sort of folks who would celebrate Armageddon. Actually, I fear they are and just don't know it yet.

Bitcoin Core won't automatically IP-ban misbehaving peers if the IP address is local, but doesn't apply the same logic to manual bans. I found this out the hard way when I accidentally banned an inbound Tor peer and took down my hidden service. I didn't even realise what happened until, wondering why my node had no inbound Tor connections, I checked my debog.log and saw it was filled with "connection from 127.0.0.1 dropped (banned)".

Is there any legitimate use for this behaviour or is it just a straight-up bug? It seems inconsistent, at least.

I disagree.

Because merely saying sorry doesn't make things right. Accept nothing less than total restitution, not empty apologies. It is right to blame those who deserve blame.

Life is too long to let misdeeds go unredressed. Those who would do evil to you will not tire of it of their own accord. You must take action. Make them rue the day they ever met you. Only if you hate your enemies with a pure hatred can your love also be pure. Don't waste your love on those who don't deserve it.

I'm running a full node using LUKS for whole-disk encryption. It doesn't affect disk performance in any way (unless you're using a CPU from the '90s or something).

ITT: BADlogic's simple mind is amazed by a common power tool.

No. Aside from the fact that it would likely cost a lot more than that, it wouldn't actually prevent anything. All it would do is delay it for a year.

No. Go ahead and imagine it if you like, but it'll remain imaginary.

That's not even slightly off. It's off by the same order of magnitude as saying "I wasn't sure how old the universe was so I just said 10 microseconds LOL." Humans don't understand large numbers.

EDIT: Typo.

Most members here are idiots posting nonsense because their signature ads are the most money they'll ever make from Bitcoin. Anyone earning significant amounts is likely to be reporting it, at least if they expect to ever spend their money. For example:
What can you buy for a million dollars without the government knowing about? A new house? Real estate deals are public record. An expensive sports car? Tax investigators look at car registrations. The government's going to find out about your wealth the moment you spend it on anything substantial, and they'll want to know where that money came from and whether you've paid your taxes on it. If you haven't, you're going to have a bad time.

Theism and religion are two different things; it's quite possible to have one or the other, or both, or neither:

	Religious	Irreligious
Theistic	Judaism Christianity Islam Theistic Hinduism* Shinto Sikhism Wicca Zoroastrianism	Deism
Atheistic	Buddhism Atheistic Hinduism* Jainism Satanism Taoism	Irreligious Atheism Agnosticism Humanism Antitheism

*Hinduism is, I think, unique among religions in that it doesn't require its followers to actually believe in its gods.

How do the various atheistic religions fit in with BADlogic's claim that atheism is a religion? Are they merely different sects of the same religion? In the same way Christianity and Sikhism are sects of the same religion, as they're both monotheistic?

¿?¿Por qué no los dos?¿?