On 7/18/07, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 04:31:20PM -0400, Anthony wrote:
Is there any chance of getting an anonymized list of all votes in the recent board election made public? I'm especially interested in how many people voted for only one candidate, but it'd also be interesting to see the various groupings of votes. The low percentage "approval" of the winners is probably a symptom of many people voting for only one candidate, but there are other possibilities.
Perhaps a compromise?
Perhaps not made public, but attaching a developer/ statistician/ mathematician / wearer of funny hats temporarily to the election committee to do some statistical wrangling should be possible without TOO much trouble, I'd think.
We can then all look at the statistics (s)he's making, and maybe ask them more questions, as necessary, without any of the worries of making the actual result-set public.
I don't think it's a good idea to give someone such information unless *everyone* gets it.
I can understand not wanting to make the information public, although just releasing a breakdown of the number of votes made seems harmless. For instance, something like:
0 votes: 12 1 vote: 56 2 votes: 23 3 votes: 98 4 votes: 42 5 votes: 33 6 votes: 23 7 votes: 21 8 votes: 44 9 votes: 65
I'm not sure how useful that's going to be, it'd certainly be *more useful* to know the actual correlations, but it'd be somewhat useful to see how many people are voting exactly 1 vote, or exactly 3 candidates, or 0 candidates, or n-1 candidates, or n candidates (where n is the total number of candidates, which I believe was 12).
Next time, we need exit polls :).