[Foundation-l] Elections email

[Milos Rancic]

On 06/10/2011 11:55 PM, Sarah wrote:
> 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.

If I wouldn't pass this time, the next one I'll ask you to become my
campaign manager ;) Obviously, you know what should be done ;)

> 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.

According to the present situation (email sent three days before the end
of elections), I think that we are pretty safe. Besides that, we don't
have any really problematic candidate, like it was on previous elections.

Besides that, participation in elections was lower in 2009 than in 2008,
which means that we need more voters. Election committee did what is in
their power to increase participation. That's about lowering
requirements, sending emails and similar. And, yes, that's not the best
way, but Election committee didn't have much more tools.

The best way is to do structural work to increase [constructive]
participation in decision-making processes out of hot topics on Wikipedias.