[Foundation-l] [Election] Unqualified votes striking

[Andrew Gray]

On 05/07/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:

> > We have no way to know the answer to your question, since we have no
> > access to tally.
>
> The encrypted votes are accessible on the website, I figured someone
> had the key.

First of all, I would assume there is some system in place to prevent
idle curiosity - does the third party keep the encryption key?
Secondly, You Just Don't Do That, It's Just Not Right. But even
assuming we could and would...

As the election has some time to go, it's rather meaningless to try
and count it now - whether or not those votes had any effect on the
ultimate result is heavily dependent on what the next 80 hours of
votes are. You could probably go back afterwards and recount with the
anulled votes made eligible to see what changes. (This sort of thing
is a pretty good way of demonstrating the sensitivity of election
systems...)

If what you're *really* asking is "could setting the limit at 200 not
400 change the result", we couldn't tell even from this result - you'd
have to find some way of extrapolating for all the other ~5,000
disqualified voters who had not voted as of disqualification, but
potentially *could* have had they not been disqualified. All very
complex...

I would be surprised if it altered much, though, since there doesn't
seem to have been any systematic error in which voters were mistakenly
enabled - the threshold error will have affected all groups equally,
to a first approximation - and as such you'd expect them to be pretty
much a representative sample of voters and thus a representative
sample of votes. (Unless one candidate particularly appeals to newer
editors, I guess...)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk