[Foundation-l] Board votes results

[Anthony]

On 7/18/07, Kim Bruning <kim at 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 :).