Re: [registrars] Re: Ballot should be secret until the end of the voting period.

[Ken Stubbs <kstubbs@digitel.net>]

here is the text from nikolaj's email (a bit further back in the thread)

    "Ascio would like to second Bob's motion, that voting results are kept
secret
until the ballot is closed.

'Open' voting during the ballot has absolutely nothing to do with openness
nor transparency.
Indeed a case can be made that it will subject the voting to regimen."



----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine" <brunner@nic-naa.net>
To: "Ken Stubbs" <kstubbs@digitel.net>
Cc: "Rob Hall" <rob@momentous.com>; "Nikolaj Nyholm" <nikolajn@ascio.com>;
"Robert F. Connelly" <rconnell@psi-japan.com>; "Registrar Constituency"
<registrars@dnso.org>; <brunner@nic-naa.net>
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 10:26 AM
Subject: Re: [registrars] Re: Ballot should be secret until the end of the
vot ing period.


> Ken,
>
> I'm not sure what the proposal is, it would help if there was text.
>
> I'll skip the irony of using mechanism-X to vote not to use mechanism-X
> due to a claim of defect in mechanism-X.
>
> I won't skip the question "What is mechanism-Y"? Personally, I really do
> favor crayon, etcetera, and circumstance-aware process over rigid
mechanism.
>
> On the question of access to ballots, etc.
>
> I know secret, winner-take-all, single-tier elections are familiar to some
> registrars, from one civic environment, and several similar to it. This
> doesn't mean it is better, simply different, from other forms of voting.
>
> One of the "pros" of that form is that campaigns only have polling data
> to change effectively outcomes.
>
> One of the "cons" of that form is that votors only have outcome-data to
> effectively detect campaigns.
>
> If (this is a hypothetical) there was effective campaigning, which had as
> its consequences, both a change in the total turn-out, and the allocation
> of the incremental turn-out, that distinguishes the non-tie 2nd vote from
> the tied 1st, an "open process" model would have allowed the existance of
> that campaign (or campaigns) to be inferred from the live data, allowing
> both tactial changes by competiting campaigns, and ballot switches by
voters.
> In the "closed process" model, the data would have only forensic value.
>
> Eric
>
>