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Debian decides to allow secret votes

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Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#241

Post by pessimizer »

mlindner wrote: post #33
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…

You're phrasing of "sunlight to disinfect the voting process" is rather disgusting personally... You try to twist something that's quite horrible, namely voter corruption through public opinion as if it is somehow "disinfecting" anything. The mob mentality of the internet is best kept away from any voting base.

Would you also support the votes of Congresspeople or MPs being secret?

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#242

Post by naniwaduni »

mariusor wrote: post #230
grumbel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored. That's a bug, not a feature. The point of not doing that with paper voting is that it makes selling your vote difficult, as nobody else can verify what you voted for. You on the other side know that you put the ballot in the box and can stay around to see if the votes in the box get accurately counted. With electronic voting yo…

> That's a bug, not a feature. I think you're wrong. A bug would be if you could tell how a vote was cast, not if it was counted.

You also want to be able to check if your vote was falsely counted, lest an unscrupulous election operator simply reassign all but a handful of votes to its preferred option.

Vote selling is a pretty nasty problem to work around.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#243

Post by skrtskrt »

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.

sure, the known set of rules causes some types of voters to be more likely to vote, and other types less likely.

The point is that you can't possibly know how all those interactions among voters would play out if you did in fact update the rules

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#244

Post by bayindirh »

SpodGaju wrote: post #154
bayindirh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No healthy group would have even considered this awful idea. HN can be considered a healthy group, but most of the people here are anonymous already. What gives?

This deserves a "Ask HN" thread of its own. I will even as why up and down vote user names are hidden from me? I look a this behavior in myself and wonder why I use all these acronyms. I feel sometimes that if others are not anonymous the extreme responses when you have a new idea or say something wrong are part of the problem. Why expose myself when the people criticizing me do not? So it is kind of a race to the bo…

I think being able to bear the responses which do not agree with yours is an important step in civil discourse, even if the tone of the responses doesn't agree with your tone, or especially kind. This is what HN has taught me over the years. It improved me leaps and bounds on that front, and it's invaluable in my eyes.

I'm not anonymous here, yet the most heated discussion never spilled over to my personal mail address, but I got some genuine questions and a couple of job offers.

So, other people's anonymity choice is not something I care about. They can be who they want. I'm here as a person, with my own choices, with my own tone. My choices brought me some great discussion, sometimes kind, sometimes not. Regardless of my correctness and knowledge level on the issue, I always came out improved from every single one of them. Either on the knowledge front, or the actual ability to discourse, or both.

So, it's not a kind of a race to the bottom. Other people's choices shouldn't bother anyone, unless the other party doesn't harass or cross some well defined lines of being civil and ethic.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#245

Post by mariusor »

naniwaduni wrote: post #242
mariusor wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a bug, not a feature. I think you're wrong. A bug would be if you could tell how a vote was cast, not if it was counted.

You also want to be able to check if your vote was falsely counted, lest an unscrupulous election operator simply reassign all but a handful of votes to its preferred option. Vote selling is a pretty nasty problem to work around.

I would normally agree with you, but no voting system today can provide you an answer to this question.

The problem of unscrupulous operators can be circumvented if the votes are in a public ledger where the voter can backtrack their vote to the ledger "yes, its' my vote, nobody tempered with it", but the vote in the ledger can not be linked to the voter.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#246

Post by jodrellblank »

_8j50 wrote: post #186

This is good. Secret ballot empowers voters. Public ballot only makes sense if the voter is a representative of other people and they want their record public for continued support.

It's fine to say "OSS developers don't owe anybody anything" in general, but Debian specifically has quite a strict vetting procedure before accepting people as developers and they agree to things like the Debian Social Contract[1] which includes: "Debian believes the makers of a free software operating system should provide guarantees when a user entrusts them with control of a computer. [...] Not hiding problems with the software or organization. [...] Staying focused on the users and the software that started the phenomenon." and a document of Developer Duties[2].

Seems like there should be few things the developers cannot do openly, but can do secretly if 'empowered', and there perhaps ought to be a public record and transparency around any incidence or accusations of vote-bullying or vote-buying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Social_Contract

[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/deve...

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#247

Post by atq2119 »

mariusor wrote: post #229
danuker wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

I do not think that we have investigated electronic voting enough to be able to say it's not feasible with such certainty. I wouldn't start with national high stakes ballots, but I'm confident that if enough smart people put their mind to it, a solution is possible.

The problem isn't one of technology but one of procurement processes. Electronic voting is largely a solution in search of a problem (purely manual processes work fine for tallying votes), and so the field is dominated by bad actors selling whatever to clueless politicians.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#248

Post by touisteur »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #131
throwaway48375 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American here and I have had to wait >2 hours to vote multiple times. In the worst instance someone tried to illegally close the polling place even though people were still lined up outside. This is in clear violation of state law. So long as you are lined up to vote before the polling place closes they have to take your vote. To the sheriff's department credit (they are generally terrible) the deputy who responded r…

The American voting system seems broken in many ways that have not much to do using paper. Elections taking place on tuesdays instead of weekends for some reason, low polling-places-per-voters ratio (though numbers are hard to find), ballots with multiple non-trivial questions, etc. Before turning to voting machines, there's a lot that could be changed at every level. Moving Election Day to weekends would be a good s…

I don't even understand the concept of voting on workdays. WTF. This is a sacred thing! Especially if you want citizens of all horizons participating (and I want people from all sides to check on each other - without being too disruptive by default... I mean there's a process for reporting and all - doing it on a weekend is a minimum.

See, no need for fancy tech. Paid officials and unpaid volunteers manning everything.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#249

Post by couchand »

winkeltripel wrote: post #214
couchand wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The behavior you describe isn't at all irrational: in a nutshell that's the effect that propelled Biden to the White House.

I don't understand your point. In ranking presidential candidates, most left-or-center-leaning voters would rank any and every Democrat above any and every Republican, with Trump as their very last choice. So the presence or not of any specific candidate doesn't change the outcome. They would have voted in whomever the Democrat Nominee was.

There was lots of reporting in 2020 about Democratic voters who preferred another candidate throwing their support behind Biden based on the idea that he was best positioned to win in the general election.

Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes

#250

Post by touisteur »

mariusor wrote: post #235
touisteur wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

Well, I live in a representative democracy, and it mostly works. I don't think the vote is only way to express political power, just the most 'sacred' and extreme of all. The one of removing your ruler (or ruling party) from power.

And making people vote on issues they're interested in just makes me think only extremes will be heard and counted, and I would have to give my opinion on a bunch of things I don't really care about, or am not quite competent enough. To me, the democratic vote should be a precious rare thing, to elect a representative or a bunch of them, and trust them to do a non-too-shitty job of it.

Referendums, IMO are among the worst democratic moments in my republic, and I feel my concitoyens (from talking to some, and reading what they say in polls or public forums) don't really vote on the specific subject but on a global policy rant. It's a place to vent, not to decide ; when your elected ruler throws up his hands and gives you back the wheel at the last moment, with little context, FSD-style.

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