Felix Lechner <[email protected]> writes: > Given the stated intent of Option 3 that "early 2022 is not the time for > rushed changes like this", the Secretary should not have admitted that > option to the ballot. It inadvertently weakened the constitutional > protection against changes to the constitution.
The Project Secretary does not have discretion over which options are admitted to the ballot. > The vote was procedurally defective. I don't see any basis in the constitution for this assertion, nor have you cited any. > Folks opposing "secret votes" should never have placed Option 2 ahead of > NOTA, and would not have done so if Option 3 had been absent. I do not believe you have enough information to make this assertion with complete confidence. For example, a vote of option 3 ahead of option 2 and option 2 ahead of NOTA is the correct and proper way of recording the opinion that they would prefer not to have secret votes but don't believe that secret votes should be blocked solely due to a supermajority requirement if they are otherwise the preference of the project's majority. I have no idea how many people hold that position. I doubt it's all of the people voting that order, but it's not an irrational position to hold. Regardless, it doesn't matter procedurally. The remedy that you're asking for doesn't exist in the constitution. The remedy available to you if you believe the outcome of this vote doesn't align with the true voter preferences is to propose a GR to reverse it or to make changes to the constitution allowing its reversal via other means. I agree with you that the interaction between options requiring a supermajority and options not requiring a supermajority is unintuitive. We've had multiple discussions about that over the years, including various hypothetical examples where the results could violate various desireable voting properties, particularly independence of irrelevant alternatives (which I think is what you're raising here). So far, the project has chosen not to make any changes on this basis, mostly because I don't think anyone has been able to come up with a fix that still preserves the property of resolving a GR with a single vote. For what it's worth, issues like this are why I dislike the common Debian practice of putting options on the ballot that have the procedural effect of NOTA plus an additional statement and generally vote them below NOTA (as I did here). However, I have been unable to convince people to stop doing this in the past and have therefore stopped trying. (And I suppose I should note that if people followed my advice, there would be no way of voting the position that they prefer not to have secret votes but don't think it should be blocked by supermajority requirements, so I guess that's an argument for such ballot options.) > Please reconsider. Otherwise the project's sole alternative may be to > replace the Project Secretary. This is an absurd escalation when you have no procedural basis for what you're demanding, and it's quite concerning coming from someone who is currently standing for DPL. It's also pointless; anyone else who replaces the Project Secretary will have to do the same thing. The discretion you're asking for simply does not exist in the constitution. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
