Earlier quoted context omitted.
do we elect Debian developers?
Exactly. I view DDs more as the citizens of a democracy, rather than the elected representatives of the citizens.
DD's are stakeholders just as the users are.
Debian decides to allow secret votes
201–210 of 280 posts
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#202Adds even more politics to tech decisions. Seems obvious what the result will be.
If you don't want politics in your tech decisions, I implore you to find a nice commune in the middle of the desert where no language is used and only mute sustenance farming is practiced, no disease is spread, and violence of any kind is met with swift ostracism and/or death.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
or that people would making a different vote if it was counted differently? Two changes would happen. A lot of people who don't vote today because their state either heavily favours the 'wrong' candidate or the 'right' candidate will already win by a massive margin, would start voting, since all of sudden their vote matters a lot more. Secondly, and more importantly, candidates would campaign very differently. In tod…
This also makes many states cease to matter. Already a big issue that big cities vote one way while rural voters go another way.
The "intended" malapportionment to benefit small states[0] is a far smaller effect than the "unintended" effect of silencing local political minorities. If you wanted to retain the former, you could replace the Electoral College with just weighing votes cast in smaller states slightly more. Right now, neither large nor small states have a say in presidential elections at all - it's purely undecided states that play kingmaker, and it drastically warps the priorities of elected Presidents.
[0] Which is also a problem. You know how everyone says the EU is undemocratic? It's for the same reason why we have an Electoral College - the whole "federal government represents states instead of people" thing.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
live in a metropolis? -also american but in a midsized city and ~15 minutes is more than the average wait.
What that means is that you don't live in a city in a republican state. For the past couple decades, the GOP has gotten increasingly brazen about reducing the number of polling places for the people they don't want to vote.
Tennessee. I think I might incredibly be in a low traffic part of town despite it being a huge commercial sector with surrounding suburbs.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not familiar with Debian's practices, but electronic voting can't work for a nation because: - centralization (there must be a central, corruptible place where the voters are authenticated or the votes are counted) - software is untrustable: https://www.win.tue.nl/%7Eaeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html The USA has had a Diebold voting scandal. Other countries are using a paper-based voting process which can be supe…
The US is not homogenous in the technology used to vote - running elections is left to the states, and different states use different polling technologies. The systems we have for voting in Washington DC seem to be a best-of-both-worlds approach. There are touchscreen kiosks that you use to make your choices, then the kiosk prints out a properly marked paper ballot that it asks you to verify. Then you take your ballo…
This is all pretty meaningless if the vote counting is still done by machine.
The US should go back to hand-counted pen and paper voting.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a binary decision. The only way to properly poll that is either rank choice voting or a second vote after voting to change or not.
Diluting the vote of your opponent/position is quite common. https://www.newsweek.com/russian-politician-discovers-2-men-...
I don't see anything in there about ranked choice voting.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because public voting is the status quo, so 3 & 4 are identical in what they would (not) change in the procedures. 3 is just an additional statement of support. If you support public voting (3) you also support 4 over 1/2.
Public voting is not status quo outside of Debian. In the real world the only places that have public voting are places that are controlled by dictators.
Most (all?) US legislatures don't have private voting and are not controlled by dictators; not sure about other countries. Voice voting does happen in some contexts and doesn't leave a record of who voted how, but most contested votes are recorded.
To me, Debian Developer feels more like a position of responsibility and representation than a member of the public. But I'm not one, and I don't know what the expectations are.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#208A brief summary because I had to re-read this a few times to figure out what was going on. Debian had a vote with 4 options: Option 1 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote" Option 2 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote and allow verification" Option 3 "Reaffirm public voting" Option 4 "None of the above" (NOTA) The objection raised here is that Option 3 and Option 4 can be consi…
Stopped using Debian a long time ago, and this is just making me glad I did exactly that. What kind of hairbrained nimrod came up with that idea!? You can't have mixed voting methods and still call it fair in any respect. Any chance there could be tampering should be considered not just to be happening, but to be assured to happen. "Secret ballots" of any sort when everyone else is not partaking in said "Secret ballo…
I'm a long term Debian user, and while I'm not sure I'm super happy with this, which distro are you using that is is more transparent than Debian wrt their decision making process?
It goes without saying that all the commercial distros are disqualified. Anything with a (B)DFL is obviously disqualified. Anything run by a small cabal that could easily communicate in an out of band way is disqualified. What do you have left?
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
You are spreading FUD written by a notorious troll that has been expelled from FOSDEM, FSFE, Debian and other organizations as well.
>You are spreading FUD written by a notorious troll that has been expelled from FOSDEM, FSFE, Debian and other organizations as well.
I was asked for citation. I more than delivered with quite a few links there. All of which were unique folks with unique situations. It seems to me you are referring to one of these but I genuinely don't know which you are talking about.
Something abundantly clear to me is that there's some serious harassment going on at Debian. No question at all to me.
It also seems to me, the harassers are not gone. People are requesting secret votes to avoid harassment. So this "expelled" troll isn't the problem.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this is that it is thinking in absolutes during a situation where people are often very willing to compromise their own beliefs just to be able to provide an answer. In normal elections we see this with people who don't like any choice, but don't want to spoil their ballot. So they pick their next best favorite. This means that if A is removed, people might pick B or C instead just because A isn't th…
As long as you assume people aren't suddenly going to prefer A to B when C is there and prefer B to A when C isn't then you can safely recalculate the result. Of course people might not necessarily act rationally but you've got to draw a line somewhere, otherwise elections are simply undefined behaviour and talking about properties of elections becomes meaningless.
Okay sure, you have to have some sort of baseline to go by. Some sort of assumption of truth as it were.
But, no, you cannot safely recalculate that result, because by and large people are the representation of chaos. undefined behavior is the norm, not defined behavior. Defined behavior is only present in any of our societies because of 'social norms', which is the only reason I relent and say that some assumptions might be possible. But I will not agree that you can 'safely' recalculate that result just using whatever assumptions some person arbitrarily has deemed 'good enough to trust'.
That kind of thinking is why most polls are actually wrong, but taken as good enough. (Yes, I'm one of those people who nit picks the randomness of their selection biases.)
P.S.
All it takes to swing an election in favor of the underdog is a single new revelation. All it takes is for people to suddenly question their previous choices. A & B might be their norm; but people can be swayed to choose C or D if the situation is right.
This is why we can't really trust assumptions without some sort of evidence to back them. At which point they stop being assumptions...