Re: Vote verification --- a futile exercise?
On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 06:49:09PM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> Not necessarily. [...]
Interesting scheme. It makes some assumptions about living habits that
might not be correct for Debian developers, though :-) (For example,
I send most of my mail around noon and around midnight.)
A more effective version might be to monitor mailing list activity directly
to see which times to target. This would be especially useful if you can
stir up a discussion in which people state their support for one of the
candidates.
One way to prevent this might be to use batched mails, for example a server
that collects mail for a whole day and then forwards them (in random order)
to the vote counter in one batch. This can be defeated by collusion between
the vote counter and the operator of this server -- but we're already assuming
anonymous mail, right? The requirements would be the same. In fact
existing anonymous mail services already use such batching and reordering,
though not on the scale of whole days.
In the extreme, every voter could operate an anonymous mail gateway for
this vote. If there is collusion between *all* the voters, then there
is little point in voting :-) However, this would ignore the problem
of voter apathy. I'm afraid that this whole scheme fails requirement 0:
0) Voting should be easy for the voters
Making voting difficult will introduce a bias that favours extremists.
Oh... I just realized that per-day batching would still not work.
Suppose the vote taker's favourite candidate does something really
unpopular halfway through the vote (such as revealing his Secret Master
Plan to Take Over the World). In that case, dropping votes from the
second half of the voting period could affect the outcome.
> [Again, not that Manoj would ever do such a vile thing.]
Indeed. We're geeks, and the election is a new toy that we're taking
apart to see how it works :-)
Richard Braakman
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