[Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Gregory Kohs<thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder what takes so long to upload a small data file?
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Board_elections/2009/Votes&oldid=1606753
>
> Let's see... August 25 minus August 12 equals nearly two weeks of delay (and
> subterfuge?)...

Not much room for subterfuge once they are posted: You'll be able
compute the full pair-wise table and confirm that it produces the same
results. Voters will be able to look through and identify that at
least one ballot identical to theirs made it in.

Since the officials can't know who will and who won't go checking for
their own ballots in the pile the only real avenue open for election
rigging is through sock/meatpuppet accounts. The edit count and
activity requirements mean that there should be sufficient public
information available on each of the voters for anyone to go sniffing
around for funny business.  Since making a meaningful impact on the
election would require on the order of 100 accounts concealing that
kind of activity would be difficult.

The voting process could be improved — but I think it's one of the
most resistant to outright manipulation of any online voting system
I've seen.

Though this level of confidence is predicated on the raw ballots being
available, at least eventually.

I provided the election committee with a sorting script on August
10th.  This script addresses Thomas' "anonymising and randomising"
concern and does so better than actually randomizing[*] because
sorting is deterministic.


---cut here---

#!/usr/bin/python
#Raw ballot information leak remover
#input is ballots, one per line, I.e.
#O,NHKCJILMGBFEDA
#OMN,GBLKIJADFC,E,H

import sys
for ballot in sorted([",".join(["".join(sorted(x)) for x in
y[:-1].split(',')]) for y in sys.stdin]):
 print ballot

---cut here---



[*] http://web.archive.org/web/20011027002011/http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2001182781025.gif