On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Brian<[email protected]> wrote: > This kind of fear mongering attitude is why we can't allow more members of > the community to vote. You'd rather spread FUD about vote buying than design > a system that allows the largest number of community members to vote.
What on earth are you talking about? Tim is concerned about legitimate risk. I don't share Tim's opinion on the matter but I certainly don't consider it "fear mongering". Like anything else it's a decision where benefits must be weighed vs costs. Fortunately the decision to disclose ballots isn't one that interacts heavily with making the voting system open to many people. On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Thomas Dalton<[email protected]> wrote: > 2009/8/26 Tim Starling <[email protected]>: >> Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data >> being released, since it allows vote-buying. > > I'm inclined to agree. I just don't see any sufficient benefit to > releasing the data to make it worth the risk. Why do people want this > information? Is it just because they don't trust the vote count? Benefit: Increased resistance to tampering by the vote operators Benefit: Increased community confidence in the process (because of the above) Benefit: Increased information available to voting system researchers (I think we're the only source of "real" ranked preferential ballots) Benefit: Increased information to inform future campaigns (knowing that ~10% of the voters last year only ranked Ting is very useful information, for candidates and for everyone contributing to the election process) Cost: Increased risk of compromising voter confidentiality (leaking information through ballot ordering) Cost: Increased risk of external manipulation (via vote buying) Cost: The actual effort required to post the data Thomas, can you tell me the names of the *people* who could have completely rigged the election in the absence of ballot disclosures? (Here is a hint: It's not the election committee) How can you trust these people absolutely when you can't even name them? Can anyone here not employed by the foundation or on the election committee do so? Even if you can trust them to be honest, can you trust them not to make mistakes? Why? They have made mistakes in the past. I have no reason to believe anyone trusted would screw with the election results intentionally. But why trust when we can verify? Vote buying is a real risk but there are many ways to catch it and the secrecy of vote buying is likely to be inversely proportional to its effects, moreover, preventing ballot disclosure only stops one form of vote buying. It would be more effective, but more development costly, to buy votes by paying people to either run some browser extension that fills out and submits the ballot for them, or give them your authentication-cookies and act as a proxy for them to open the HTTPS connection to the back-end server and vote as you. In the latter case the voter couldn't even fake out the payer. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
