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Debian decides to allow secret votes

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Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#231

Post by contravariant »

sjmm1989 wrote: post #210
contravariant wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that human behaviour is unpredictable and irrational, but as far as voting systems go I'm happy to argue that if some change wouldn't affect the result assuming people are voting rationally, then there is no cause to invalidate the vote.

Otherwise you're just arguing the vote is invalid because it would have ended differently in a rerun, and you have to stop somewhere.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#232

Post by josteink »

pydry wrote: post #25

For anybody wondering why you might want some sunlight to disinfect the voting process a look at how the NSA has previously managed to corrupt internet standards: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2013/... I'd be shocked if they didnt also have their claws into debian's operations for similar reasons. I'd not be very surprised if they were indirectly behind this push either. The fact that this se…

> The fact that this seems to be inspired by the people backing the very obvious hatchet job done on Richard Stallman only makes me more suspicious that its motives are anything but pure.

From the outside looking in, it looks like another obvious SJW coup.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#233

Post by mariusor »

iso1210 wrote: post #115
charcircuit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electronic voting systems using zero knowledge proofs are superior to paper votes because it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored. Paper voting is extremely expensive to scale compared to a website that lets you vote. Everyone could get a notification on their phone when they are asked to vote on something as opposed to having to fill out paper and send it somewhere to…

> Paper voting is extremely expensive to scale And thus is impossible to hack at scale. It costs $x to run an election and count the votes for Y thousand peple voting for a position, that scales pretty much linearly - have 1 ballot and 1,000 votes costing say $100, have 1 ballot and 1 million votes and it costs no more than $100,000

> And thus is impossible to hack at scale.

I think numerous cases of electoral fraud over the course of global history prove this statement wrong.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#234

Post by meatmanek »

pmoriarty wrote: post #205
jffry wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you suspect a problem with the vote-counting machines, you can audit the paper votes with pen and paper. But in the cases where there isn't much reason to doubt the outcome of the election, you can save the cost of all that labor by letting a machine do something machines do really well.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#235

Post by mariusor »

touisteur wrote: post #43
qsort wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper voting ensures privacy and voter verification, something even the best electronic solutions can't properly handle. No thanks, I can actually show up and vote once every few years.

I agree. I don't understand the argument of reducing cost of elections and scaling. The current paper system in place in most works (at least in European countries where I've witnessed the process) and doesn't need to scale more. If actors in a democracy can't afford such a system, and the occasional (once, twice a year) walk to the voting place, 15 minutes wait and fellow-citizen interaction, can't we accept they do…

> I don't understand the argument of reducing cost of elections and scaling.

How about if we could scale ballots to such an extent that a citizen can vote from wherever/whenever on all issues they're interested in[1], not just a head of state election every X years? Wouldn't that be a more democratic process ?

I believe it would, and that paper ballots won't get us there.

[1] A current instance of this is the Swiss voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#236

Post by mywittyname »

skrtskrt wrote: post #128
gregmac wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see also counting of the 'popular vote' for US president, a ballot which has never been tried, and whose results are unknowable. I don't follow this point. I'm not an American, but my understanding is counting via simple popular vote vs "electoral college" doesn't change the ballot itself, you still vote for the president directly; it just changes the way the ballots are counted. Are you suggesting either something…

The point about the American election is that if people knew going into the vote that it was a popular vote across the country, voting behavior would change. Many people don’t vote at all because their preferred president has a 0% chance of winning their state and the vast majority of states are winner-take all with the electoral votes

Maybe they do vote because local elections are important.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#237

Post by pessimizer »

logicchains wrote: post #218
asiachick wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't so different in the EU is it? Smaller countries don't want their needs ignored by the bigger countries so they get more seats relative to their population than big countries. Maybe it's hard to imagine the United States of American to become 50 independent countries but isn't the way you keep them united is by promising the smaller ones that they won't be trampled on by the big ones?

Nobody wants full democracy. Full democracy is what allowed Hitler to get away with gassing six million Jews, just because the majority of the population agreed it was a good idea at the time. Now Germany has very strict constitutional protections of certain rights to make it very hard for the majority to violate the minority like that again. State rights act similarly, protecting the populations of individual states…

This wouldn't help Jews in WWII because Jews weren't grouped into a single German electoral region.

If you spread 49.9% of the population evenly in a system where states vote rather than individuals, you've insured that this minority gets no representation.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#238

Post by naniwaduni »

kmeisthax wrote: post #203
treeman79 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

> 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.

The grass sure is greener on every other side.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#239

Post by pessimizer »

mywittyname wrote: post #236
skrtskrt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point about the American election is that if people knew going into the vote that it was a popular vote across the country, voting behavior would change. Many people don’t vote at all because their preferred president has a 0% chance of winning their state and the vast majority of states are winner-take all with the electoral votes

Maybe they do vote because local elections are important.

Local elections can be important, but if all the candidates are bad, they're not.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#240

Post by CogitoCogito »

spondyl wrote: post #9

A 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…

What does "reaffirm public voting" mean in this context? Would "reaffirm public voting" have resulted in concrete action that would not have occurred had "none of the above" won?
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