[Foundation-l] Elections email

[Sarah]

2011/6/10 Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby at gmail.com>:
> As Shane said, there are built-in features in the SecurePoll software
> that help us to control for sockpuppeting, so we are pretty safe.
> Sockpuppeting in a large enough scale to influence an election of this
> size would also be very difficult to pull through, and practically
> impossible to do undetected.

Jon, there's no built-in feature in the software that will tell you
account A is someone voting from home, and account B is the same
person voting from an internet cafe a block away.

This is always the case. But add to it (a) requiring only 300 edits
across all the projects in 10 years, just 20 since November 2010, and
(b) that the software is actively inviting all accounts that meet
those requirements, it means we're alerting all the socks that they're
able to vote. They might otherwise not even have remembered some of
the accounts the software is reminding them of.

This is just not a good idea.

Sarah

>
> 2011/6/11, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com>:
>>> On 10 June 2011 22:19, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I've received two invitations to vote -- also both at the same e-mail
>>>> address -- so all I'd have to do now (if it were a user name that
>>>> didn't make it obvious it was mine) is go somewhere else to vote. And
>>>> given how low the voting requirements are the software must be sending
>>>> out multiple invitations to quite a few people.
>>>>
>>>> I can't see how it benefits the project to have multiple accounts
>>>> voting that only need to have made 300 edits and 20 recent ones, and a
>>>> kind bot that reminds them of all the eligible account names. We're
>>>> shooting ourselves in the foot with this, surely.
>>>>
>> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 15:29, Thomas Morton
>> <morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>> Perhaps. Although with that said nearly 1000 people have voted today -
>>> compared to between 100-200 on the previous days (excepting the 29th,
>>> first
>>> day, which had about 600-800). So it's a case of; is the risk worth the
>>> reward?
>>>
>> It's more than a risk, though, it's a certainty that the software is
>> inviting multiple alternate/sock accounts to vote. And there's no way
>> of knowing what the percentage is. So the cost/benefit can't be
>> addressed, because we have no figures.
>>
>> Sarah
>>
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>
> --
> mvh
> Jon Harald Søby <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by>
>
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