[Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots

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Gregory Kohs

25 Aug 2009 25 Aug '09

5:59 p.m.

I wonder what takes so long to upload a small data file? http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Board_elections/2009/Votes&… Let's see... August 25 minus August 12 equals nearly two weeks of delay (and subterfuge?)... It only took three days to post the ballots in 2008: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Board_elections/2008/Votes/en&a… What's different about 2009? I mean, other than the fact that the Wikivoices interview tape #45 of the Board candidates was mysteriously "lost", and that the WMF staff budget is about three times larger now than it was then. This must be the professionalism and efficiency we were expecting from all of the added money being thrown at the Foundation. -- Gregory Kohs

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Thomas Dalton

25 Aug 25 Aug

6:05 p.m.

2009/8/25 Gregory Kohs <thekohser(a)gmail.com>om>:

...

I wonder what takes so long to upload a small data file?

It needs anonymising and randomising first, so it isn't just uploading. It seems an unnecessary delay, though, I agree. The pairwise results are all up on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Results

Gregory Maxwell

6:26 p.m.

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Gregory Kohs<thekohser(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Not much room for subterfuge once they are posted: You'll be able compute the full pair-wise table and confirm that it produces the same results. Voters will be able to look through and identify that at least one ballot identical to theirs made it in. Since the officials can't know who will and who won't go checking for their own ballots in the pile the only real avenue open for election rigging is through sock/meatpuppet accounts. The edit count and activity requirements mean that there should be sufficient public information available on each of the voters for anyone to go sniffing around for funny business. Since making a meaningful impact on the election would require on the order of 100 accounts concealing that kind of activity would be difficult. The voting process could be improved — but I think it's one of the most resistant to outright manipulation of any online voting system I've seen. Though this level of confidence is predicated on the raw ballots being available, at least eventually. I provided the election committee with a sorting script on August 10th. This script addresses Thomas' "anonymising and randomising" concern and does so better than actually randomizing[*] because sorting is deterministic. ---cut here--- #!/usr/bin/python #Raw ballot information leak remover #input is ballots, one per line, I.e. #O,NHKCJILMGBFEDA #OMN,GBLKIJADFC,E,H import sys for ballot in sorted([",".join(["".join(sorted(x)) for x in y[:-1].split(',')]) for y in sys.stdin]): print ballot ---cut here--- [*] http://web.archive.org/web/20011027002011/http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert…

Gerard Meijssen

6:39 p.m.

Hoi, The data of the Wikivoices interviews were never lost. It was not given to Gregory on his request. It will be either published publicly or not published at all. This has been said before and it is now said again. Thanks, GerardM 2009/8/25 Gregory Kohs <thekohser(a)gmail.com>

...

Tim Starling

26 Aug 26 Aug

2:12 p.m.

Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying. Even if the numbers given by voters are reduced to the smallest values which still give the same rankings, with 18 candidates there are 18 factorial possible orderings. That number is sufficiently higher than the number of voters that a party wishing to buy votes can specify a voter-specific ticket with some random rankings, and be reasonably assured that if that ticket appears in the final unencrypted dump, then the contract was fulfilled and money can be transferred to the voter. In 2008 the unencrypted votes were rapidly released, but I was not involved in that decision. This year, I don't think I have been asked directly to provide this data, but it seems that the Board and election committee is in favour of it being released, and nobody else has offerred to produce the data. So I just wrote the relevant script, and am now testing it, so the results will be available to the committee and the Board shortly. -- Tim Starling

Nathan

2:23 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

Contrast your comments with those of Greg Maxwell earlier in this thread; the conclusion I draw is that while releasing the raw data might provide confirmation for anyone involved in buying votes, such vote-buying is unlikely to significantly alter the election outcome. Nathan

Gregory Maxwell

3:09 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM, Tim Starling<tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying. Even if the numbers given

Although I was trying to avoid advertising it in public this was something I'm aware of and had pointed out to the election committee, but something I don't consider to be a risk we can meaningfully address by not releasing ballots. Quoting myself from a private email: I think the bigger risk is vote watermarking leading to vote buying: I.e. You could register with my site and tell me you want to vote for "M,ABFO,CDEGHIJKLN" I then tell you I'll give you $10 if someone votes for "G,M,ABFO,CJ,LN,DEGHIK". I make sure not to give out the same modified ballot twice, and I pay people if the ballots end up in the report. To fight against this I recommended that the WMF delay ballot disclosures for a few months and announce that they'd be doing so. People will be less inclined to wait for their $10. ;) I don't think stronger protection is justified because people could just load some toolbar that votes for them like subvertandprofit uses. http://subvertandprofit.com/content/prices is a good cluestick for people who think you can solve quality challenges with voting. :) So, basically, my position is that the risk of buying due to vote marking isn't much greater than the risk of buying based on the puppet voter intentionally using a buyer controlled web-browser to vote... and that we can equalize the risk by simply delaying the ballot release a little bit, but not so much as to degrade the value of the ballots as evidence that the election was conducted fairly.

...

by voters are reduced to the smallest values which still give the same rankings, with 18 candidates there are 18 factorial possible orderings. That number is sufficiently higher than the number of voters that a party wishing to buy votes can specify a voter-specific

[snip] Nitpicking, but the number of possible unique ballots is much greater than the factorial because of equality, and equality must be preserved in order produce the election calculations. The formula mostly easily represented is a messy multipart recursive formula, which I'll spare you (in part because I don't know that I have all the boundary conditions right). It's less than X!*2^(X-1).

Aryeh Gregor

4:14 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Gregory Maxwell<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Nitpicking, but the number of possible unique ballots is much greater than the factorial because of equality, and equality must be preserved in order produce the election calculations. The formula mostly easily represented is a messy multipart recursive formula, which I'll spare you (in part because I don't know that I have all the boundary conditions right). It's less than X!*2^(X-1).

I think it's the sum from k = 1 to n of S(n, k)*k!, where S(n, k) is a Stirling number of the second kind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_second_kind S(n, k) is the number of ways to divide an n-element set into k partitions. So there are S(n, k) ways to obtain k distinct "levels" of candidates after tying, and then there are k! different ways to order the levels against each other. Maxima gives the following results: (%i3) sum(stirling2(18,k)*(k!), k, 1, 18); (%o3) 3385534663256845323 (%i4) 18!; (%o4) 6402373705728000 So it's about 529 times more than 18!. Admittedly, determining this was a completely pointless exercise, but it was kind of fun.

Andrew Leung

5:49 p.m.

Full disclaimer: I contribute in Wikispecies. First, calling a project as "zero quality project", whether it belongs to WMF or Wikia or somewhere else, is downright assuming bad faith. Second, all of the discussion links in your "boycott" section took place in 2005 and 2006, clearly unable to recognize that consensus can change (and probably had changed since those are aged discussion). Third, we have accommodated multi-lingual requests by including vernacular names section. But you have to recognize the fact that the entire scientific community describing new species all communicate in English and use Linnaean taxonomy. Even if the paper is in foreign language, the abstract would at least have an English version. This norm has been set since 1735 (the year which Linnaeus first published Systema Naturae). We often get compared between Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), so I grabbed a correspondence with someone who shares data to both EOL and Wikispecies (permission already granted beforehand by these 2 individuals on quoting this email). The Zookeys, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on species, publisher Dr. Lyubomir Penev said this to a Wikispecies editor: "Today I was amazed to see that your latest edit of the Haplodesmidae page (with my Agathodesmus revision and Sergei Golovatch's Eutrichodesmus paper) was dated 19 June, *one day* after ZooKeys published it. You may even have beaten ZooBank, which links to ZooKeys." Furthermore, Dr. Penev said Encyclopedia of Life still hasn't got any details from ZooKeys, and the Catalogue of Life is years behind. Keep in mind that ZooKeys and EOL are partners, yet EOL has not used any data even from the first issue of ZooKeys, which is published in July 2008. Also, keep in mind that most images from EOL are licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA, which is unsuitable for reuse in Commons or WMF projects. Finally, to dismiss any claims that Wikispecies is a zero quality project, we have an agreed collaboration with ZooKeys, which will see hundreds of new species images continuously being uploaded to Commons. We are already planning another collaboration with Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae which will grant us permission to upload their otherwise-copyrighted images to Commons under CC-BY-SA 3.0 to illustrate articles in WMF. We also granted special access to their pdf papers without a 2-year delay. Has any WMF projects successfully worked out collaborations to get large quantities of new species images in high quality and accuracy? Andrew "Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up." On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com>wrote:

...

I cannot understand why WMF is unable to terminate Wikispecies which is a zero quality project. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies (also in English) Klaus Graf

Andrew Leung

5:52 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Wikispecies

Opps, used wrong subject line. So here's what I said about Wikispecies.

...

From: andrewcleung(a)hotmail.com To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:49:36 -0400 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots Full disclaimer: I contribute in Wikispecies. First, calling a project as "zero quality project", whether it belongs to WMF or Wikia or somewhere else, is downright assuming bad faith. Second, all of the discussion links in your "boycott" section took place in 2005 and 2006, clearly unable to recognize that consensus can change (and probably had changed since those are aged discussion). Third, we have accommodated multi-lingual requests by including vernacular names section. But you have to recognize the fact that the entire scientific community describing new species all communicate in English and use Linnaean taxonomy. Even if the paper is in foreign language, the abstract would at least have an English version. This norm has been set since 1735 (the year which Linnaeus first published Systema Naturae). We often get compared between Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), so I grabbed a correspondence with someone who shares data to both EOL and Wikispecies (permission already granted beforehand by these 2 individuals on quoting this email). The Zookeys, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on species, publisher Dr. Lyubomir Penev said this to a Wikispecies editor: "Today I was amazed to see that your latest edit of the Haplodesmidae page (with my Agathodesmus revision and Sergei Golovatch's Eutrichodesmus paper) was dated 19 June, *one day* after ZooKeys published it. You may even have beaten ZooBank, which links to ZooKeys." Furthermore, Dr. Penev said Encyclopedia of Life still hasn't got any details from ZooKeys, and the Catalogue of Life is years behind. Keep in mind that ZooKeys and EOL are partners, yet EOL has not used any data even from the first issue of ZooKeys, which is published in July 2008. Also, keep in mind that most images from EOL are licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA, which is unsuitable for reuse in Commons or WMF projects. Finally, to dismiss any claims that Wikispecies is a zero quality project, we have an agreed collaboration with ZooKeys, which will see hundreds of new species images continuously being uploaded to Commons. We are already planning another collaboration with Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae which will grant us permission to upload their otherwise-copyrighted images to Commons under CC-BY-SA 3.0 to illustrate articles in WMF. We also granted special access to their pdf papers without a 2-year delay. Has any WMF projects successfully worked out collaborations to get large quantities of new species images in high quality and accuracy? Andrew "Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up." On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com>wrote:

I cannot understand why WMF is unable to terminate Wikispecies which is a zero quality project. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies (also in English) Klaus Graf

Propose it be closed at Meta then. -- Alex (User:Majorly) _________________________________________________________________ Stay on top of things, check email from other accounts! http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9671355 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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Gerard Meijssen

5:57 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Wikispecies

Hoi, When people put forward their opinion that a project is of low or no quality, there is no reason at all to hold back. The only thing that you may hope for is that the person expressing this opinion is honest. That is the good faith that you have to assume. There is no reason at all, to hold back on a bad opinion of a project when you can argue why a project is awful. The only thing you ask for is that the opinion is expressed with arguments. Without arguments good or bad opinions about a project are hardly relevant. Thanks, GerardM 2009/8/26 Andrew Leung <andrewcleung(a)hotmail.com>

...

Opps, used wrong subject line. So here's what I said about Wikispecies.

WMF or Wikia or somewhere else, is downright assuming bad faith. Second, all of the discussion links in your "boycott" section took place in 2005 and 2006, clearly unable to recognize that consensus can change (and probably had changed since those are aged discussion). Third, we have accommodated multi-lingual requests by including vernacular names section. But you have to recognize the fact that the entire scientific community describing new species all communicate in English and use Linnaean taxonomy. Even if the paper is in foreign language, the abstract would at least have an English version. This norm has been set since 1735 (the year which Linnaeus first published Systema Naturae).

We often get compared between Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), so I grabbed a

correspondence with someone who shares data to both EOL and Wikispecies (permission already granted beforehand by these 2 individuals on quoting this email). The Zookeys, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on species, publisher Dr. Lyubomir Penev said this to a Wikispecies editor:

"Today I was amazed to see that your latest edit of the Haplodesmidae

page (with my Agathodesmus revision and Sergei Golovatch's Eutrichodesmus paper) was dated 19 June, *one day* after ZooKeys published it. You may even have beaten ZooBank, which links to ZooKeys."

Furthermore, Dr. Penev said Encyclopedia of Life still hasn't got any

details from ZooKeys, and the Catalogue of Life is years behind. Keep in mind that ZooKeys and EOL are partners, yet EOL has not used any data even from the first issue of ZooKeys, which is published in July 2008. Also, keep in mind that most images from EOL are licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA, which is unsuitable for reuse in Commons or WMF projects.

Finally, to dismiss any claims that Wikispecies is a zero quality

project, we have an agreed collaboration with ZooKeys, which will see hundreds of new species images continuously being uploaded to Commons. We are already planning another collaboration with Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae which will grant us permission to upload their otherwise-copyrighted images to Commons under CC-BY-SA 3.0 to illustrate articles in WMF. We also granted special access to their pdf papers without a 2-year delay. Has any WMF projects successfully worked out collaborations to get large quantities of new species images in high quality and accuracy?

Andrew "Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up." On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Klaus Graf <klausgraf at googlemail.com wrote: > I cannot understand why WMF is unable to terminate Wikispecies which > is a zero quality project. See > > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies (also in

English)

Klaus Graf

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John Vandenberg

27 Aug 27 Aug

4:51 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Wikispecies

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:52 AM, Andrew Leung<andrewcleung(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

...

.. We often get compared between Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), so I grabbed a correspondence with someone who shares data to both EOL and Wikispecies (permission already granted beforehand by these 2 individuals on quoting this email). The Zookeys, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on species, publisher Dr. Lyubomir Penev said this to a Wikispecies editor: "Today I was amazed to see that your latest edit of the Haplodesmidae page (with my Agathodesmus revision and Sergei Golovatch's Eutrichodesmus paper) was dated 19 June, *one day* after ZooKeys published it. You may even have beaten ZooBank, which links to ZooKeys."

:-) Wikispecies will have a niche if it can prove to be regularly on the leading edge. Has there been any discussions about putting newly described species onto the front page? If the information is made accessible, Wikinews editors could write up stories about new discoveries.

...

Finally, to dismiss any claims that Wikispecies is a zero quality project, we have an agreed collaboration with ZooKeys, which will see hundreds of new species images continuously being uploaded to Commons. We are already planning another collaboration with Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae which will grant us permission to upload their otherwise-copyrighted images to Commons under CC-BY-SA 3.0 to illustrate articles in WMF. We also granted special access to their pdf papers without a 2-year delay. Has any WMF projects successfully worked out collaborations to get large quantities of new species images in high quality and accuracy?

What is the "2-year delay" ? I have looked at the AEMNP website, and all of their articles appear to be availabl on their website. What is their open access policy? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Acta_Entomologica_Musei_Nati… -- John Vandenberg

Andrew Leung

3:37 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Wikispecies

...

Wikispecies will have a niche if it can prove to be regularly on the leading edge. Has there been any discussions about putting newly described species onto the front page? If the information is made accessible, Wikinews editors could write up stories about new discoveries.

Too many new species are described (note: described =/= discovered) each week. We did have an idea of featuring 1 species per day/week but the idea got fizzled when the amount of workload is involved.

...

The home page (http://www.aemnp.eu/) only shows some highlighted papers in the latest article. For all papers, you will have to go to http://www.aemnp.eu/latest_issue.htm, but you will discover that the majority of the pdfs only provide an abstract. They will only release the full paper after that 2 year delay, but they kindly granted us access to the full versions of all online issues. For comparsion, those with the restrictions lifted will have a page that has links with the pdf logo (e.g. http://www.aemnp.eu/Volume45.htm) while those still under the delay shows the majority of papers having the textpad logo instead (e.g. http://www.aemnp.eu/Volume48_2.htm) Andrew "Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up." _________________________________________________________________ Attention all humans. We are your photos. Free us. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9666047

Samuel Klein

2:46 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Wikispecies

Andrew, This is a great response and anecdote. I have regularly run across people working on EOL, which has a broad staff one of whose tasks is to keep an eye on species-data resources around the web; and they are generally quite positive about wikispecies, and thinking about ways to better collaborate with the project. So there is certainly no consensus among the field experts that there is anything wrong with the project -- to the contrary, there is a certain sense that wikispecies may one day become a place to find the largest mutually collaborating community (in contrast to many other places that accept submissions of formally structured data but don't have much in the way of discussion or meta-analysis -- for instance on how to display disputed classificaitons; many sources simply make an executive choice and don't highlight the fact of the dispute at all). That said, it's true that many things could be done improve wikispecies -- for instance better translations of the main page and information about the site, and a move to its own domain name, for better stats tracking if nothing else. --SJ On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Andrew Leung<andrewcleung(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

...

I cannot understand why WMF is unable to terminate Wikispecies which is a zero quality project. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies (also in English) Klaus Graf

Andrew Leung

3:45 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Wikispecies

We always wanted to collaborate with scientific journals and projects, regardless of its size. But remember that we can't use EOL images unless they're from Flickr or Wikipedia, which means we probably have uploaded them to Commons already. Perhaps we should give the Main Page a facelift, showing a featured species (with image) and a slideshow of images. Any more ideas? Andrew "Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up."

...

Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:46:36 -0400 From: meta.sj(a)gmail.com To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikispecies Andrew, This is a great response and anecdote. I have regularly run across people working on EOL, which has a broad staff one of whose tasks is to keep an eye on species-data resources around the web; and they are generally quite positive about wikispecies, and thinking about ways to better collaborate with the project. So there is certainly no consensus among the field experts that there is anything wrong with the project -- to the contrary, there is a certain sense that wikispecies may one day become a place to find the largest mutually collaborating community (in contrast to many other places that accept submissions of formally structured data but don't have much in the way of discussion or meta-analysis -- for instance on how to display disputed classificaitons; many sources simply make an executive choice and don't highlight the fact of the dispute at all). That said, it's true that many things could be done improve wikispecies -- for instance better translations of the main page and information about the site, and a move to its own domain name, for better stats tracking if nothing else. --SJ On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Andrew Leung<andrewcleung(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

I cannot understand why WMF is unable to terminate Wikispecies which is a zero quality project. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Gnom/Wikispecies (also in English) Klaus Graf

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Anthony

26 Aug 26 Aug

3:17 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying.

What's wrong with vote-buying? It's no worse than seat-buying.

Svip

3:20 p.m.

2009/8/26 Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>rg>:

...

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying.

What's wrong with vote-buying? It's no worse than seat-buying.

I am not sure I understand the logic in this comment. If something is bad; then it doesn't matter if something else is equally bad? And we shouldn't bother fighting either one unless we can fight both? Makes little sense to me.

Jonathan G Hall

3:31 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 05:20:39PM +0200, Svip wrote:

...

2009/8/26 Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>rg>:

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying.

What's wrong with vote-buying? It's no worse than seat-buying.

I think we may all have fallen foul of the fact that sarcasm-over-IP doesn't work very well. Tim's comment reads as probably sarcastic to me, at any rate. J -- Jonathan G Hall <jonathan(a)sinewave42.com> OpenPGP KeyID: 0xB3D66A8C

Jonathan G Hall

3:48 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 03:31:21PM +0000, Jonathan G Hall wrote:

...

I think we may all have fallen foul of the fact that sarcasm-over-IP doesn't work very well. Tim's comment reads as probably sarcastic to me, at any rate.

I meant Anthony's comment there, and it doesn't appear to have been sarcastic given his response. Sorry. J -- Jonathan G Hall <jonathan(a)sinewave42.com> OpenPGP KeyID: 0xB3D66A8C

Anthony

3:32 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Svip <svippy(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

2009/8/26 Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org>rg>:

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org wrote:

Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying.

What's wrong with vote-buying? It's no worse than seat-buying.

You're adding in a "therefore" which I never intended. I don't have a problem with seat-buying, so long as the current board approves of the candidate, anyway. And in the case of a WMF election the current board has the final say in whether or not to seat the candidate. So you'll have to start by showing why seat-buying is bad. And then you'll probably have to find a new foundation to support.

Thomas Dalton

5:26 p.m.

2009/8/26 Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:

...

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?

Stephen Bain

28 Aug 28 Aug

12:09 a.m.

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Because they know in their hearts that the Schulze method is stupid, and their heads just want to make sure. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

Thomas Dalton

12:17 a.m.

2009/8/28 Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com>om>:

...

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Because they know in their hearts that the Schulze method is stupid, and their heads just want to make sure.

Could you elaborate on that?

Tim Starling

1:29 p.m.

Stephen Bain wrote:

...

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Because they know in their hearts that the Schulze method is stupid, and their heads just want to make sure.

Note that it's possible to run a number of different voting methods on the election just from the pairwise defeats matrix, which was released from the start. I can release results aggregated in a few other ways, if that would make people happier, especially if someone is prepared to write the code. Also, it's possible to set up a web page which lets you check if a given encrypted record (receipt) was included in the final count. From a vote-buying prevention perspective, we can't automatically confirm to the voter what the contents of that vote was, but we can do some random spot checks. The Schulze method is indeed non-ideal for a multi-winner election, I don't think anyone who understands the cloneproof property disputes that. Multi-winner elections should use a proportional method such as STV. Markus Schulze himself has been developing a multi-winner election method which combines STV with Condorcet winner concepts. But that's a discussion for the next election, what's done is done. -- Tim Starling

Brian

26 Aug 26 Aug

5:37 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;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.

Gregory Maxwell

6:08 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote:

...

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<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

2009/8/26 Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:

Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data being released, since it allows vote-buying.

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.

Brian

6:13 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

...

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote:

This kind of fear mongering attitude is why we can't allow more members

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.

The reason we let such a tiny fraction of the community vote is because of an irrational and inflated fear of fraudulent votes. The risk has been blown entirely out of proportion and absolutely no technical measures have been been pursued. The Board and those who they coordinate with technically sit around and drum up the scariest possible situations they can think of and then develop a policy which prevents it from happening without even considering technologies that would allow more people to vote. You say its a legitimate risk, but you do not quantify how risky you believe it is. The answer is that it is almost zero.

Gregory Maxwell

6:28 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote:

...

You've conflated issues. Regardless how how eligibility works the decision to release ballots or not has implications. It's a separate issue. I'm not sure how to make it more clear that were not discussing voter eligibility here. So instead lets discuss eligibility some: Can you provide the eligibility criteria you'd like to apply? Please be precise and actionable, i.e. make sure that I could write a program using the publicly available data to determine eligibility. I think this would be most enlightening. (Oh, and in the future please provide citations when you make claims like 'the board is drumming up scary situations', because as far as I know it's not correct and you're just ranting.)

Tim Starling

6:21 p.m.

Brian wrote:

...

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote: > Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data > being released, since it allows vote-buying. Even if the numbers given > by voters are reduced to the smallest values which still give the same > rankings, with 18 candidates there are 18 factorial possible > orderings. That number is sufficiently higher than the number of > voters that a party wishing to buy votes can specify a voter-specific > ticket with some random rankings, and be reasonably assured that if > that ticket appears in the final unencrypted dump, then the contract > was fulfilled and money can be transferred to the voter.

[...]

...

My hope is that the opposite is true. I'm interested in building protections against attacks such as vote-buying into our software, so that we can have wider participation in elections without leaving the system open to subversion. Ultimately the decision is not up to me, but I don't want technical deficiencies to be used as arguments against wider participation. -- Tim Starling

Brian

6:23 p.m.

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

Brian wrote:

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org wrote: > Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data > being released, since it allows vote-buying. Even if the numbers given > by voters are reduced to the smallest values which still give the same > rankings, with 18 candidates there are 18 factorial possible > orderings. That number is sufficiently higher than the number of > voters that a party wishing to buy votes can specify a voter-specific > ticket with some random rankings, and be reasonably assured that if > that ticket appears in the final unencrypted dump, then the contract > was fulfilled and money can be transferred to the voter.

[...]

This kind of fear mongering attitude is why we can't allow more members

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.

That is great to hear, and I do apologize.

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participants (15)

Andrew Leung
Anthony
Aryeh Gregor
Brian
Gerard Meijssen
Gregory Kohs
Gregory Maxwell
John Vandenberg
Jonathan G Hall
Nathan
Samuel Klein
Stephen Bain
Svip
Thomas Dalton
Tim Starling