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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> This kind of fear mongering attitude is why we can't allow more members of
> the community to vote. You'd rather spread FUD about vote buying than design
> a system that allows the largest number of community members to vote.

What on earth are you talking about?

Tim is concerned about legitimate risk.  I don't share Tim's opinion
on the matter but I certainly don't consider it "fear mongering".
Like anything else it's a decision where benefits must be weighed vs
costs.  Fortunately the decision to disclose ballots isn't one that
interacts heavily with making the voting system open to many people.


On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/26 Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>:
>> Let me say for the record that I'm not at all happy with this data
>> being released, since it allows vote-buying.
>
> I'm inclined to agree. I just don't see any sufficient benefit to
> releasing the data to make it worth the risk. Why do people want this
> information? Is it just because they don't trust the vote count?

Benefit: Increased resistance to tampering by the vote operators
Benefit: Increased community confidence in the process (because of the above)
Benefit: Increased information available to voting system researchers
(I think we're the only source of "real" ranked preferential ballots)
Benefit: Increased information to inform future campaigns (knowing
that ~10% of the voters last year only ranked Ting is very useful
information, for candidates and for everyone contributing to the
election process)
Cost: Increased risk of compromising voter confidentiality (leaking
information through ballot ordering)
Cost: Increased risk of external manipulation (via vote buying)
Cost: The actual effort required to post the data

Thomas, can you tell me the names of the *people* who could have
completely rigged the election in the absence of ballot disclosures?
(Here is a hint: It's not the election committee) How can you trust
these people absolutely when you can't even name them?  Can anyone
here not employed by the foundation or on the election committee do
so? Even if you can trust them to be honest, can you trust them not to
make mistakes? Why? They have made mistakes in the past.

I have no reason to believe anyone trusted would screw with the
election results intentionally. But why trust when we can verify?

Vote buying is a real risk but there are many ways to catch it and the
secrecy of vote buying is likely to be inversely proportional to its
effects, moreover, preventing ballot disclosure only stops one form of
vote buying.  It would be more effective, but more development costly,
to buy votes by paying people to either run some browser extension
that fills out and submits the ballot for them, or give them your
authentication-cookies and act as a proxy for them to open the HTTPS
connection to the back-end server and vote as you. In the latter case
the voter couldn't even fake out the payer.