Re: [Membership] [Comment-Mac] Re: Secret ballots

[Darrell Greenwood <darrell_greenwood@mindlink.net>]

At 12:10 AM -0700 5/18/99, Kent Crispin wrote:

>In summary, a guaranteed honest secret ballot would be preferable to
>a roll-call vote.  But the precise problem at hand is guaranteeing
>honesty, and it is far, far easier to do that with a roll call.  In
>the particular environment in question -- highly distributed
>multicultural international elections -- construction of a secret
>voting procedure that everyone will trust will be a major chore, and
>probably fairly expensive.  Constructing a roll-call based voting
>procedure that everybody will trust is very much simpler.

Kent has put this point in a nutshell quite nicely.

FWIW, I strongly agree with Kent, the roll call vote is the way to
go. The huge number of 'zero cost scrutineers' you get by this method
outweigh easily, in my perception, any privacy problems.

I can quickly confirm my vote is recorded correctly... and block
voting will be screamingly obvious to everybody. With a secret ballot
both those points will be a utter mystery.

I think the approach taken with other 'at large' membership
recommendations, try it and see how it works, could easily apply
here. It would be fairly easy to move to secret ballot if it was
shown to be necessary, whereas the reverse is not the case.

I feel a secret ballot increases the chance of fraud by a couple of
orders of magnitude.  I feel one will be lucky if holding a secret
ballot increases the cost by /only/ a couple of orders of magnitude.

Cheers,

Darrell


--
Darrell Greenwood           mailto:Darrell_Greenwood@mindlink.net
Vancouver, BC               http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/