Re: Ending votes early
> > I've always taken it to mean "ignoring the slight possibility that
> > people who have voted didn't mean what they said".
On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 08:02:00PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> I am not sure that the possibility is slight, really.
Oh? In the elections you have details on, roughly how many ballots
(out of how many total) got changed?
> > The thing I don't like about this is that it doesn't allow for quick
> > resolution making when everybody does, in fact, agree. Maybe not an
> > issue for general resolutions, but maybe significant for smaller
> > groups like the technical committee.
>
> Certainly this should not happen for general resolution, or
> for DPL elections. That takes care of all the secret balloting, and
> since most of the votes are not secret, I think the use case for
> ending the vote early loses, since the group can decide to take
> action based on the current status if they are sure. Why should the
> decision lie with the secretary, and not the customers fo the voting
> mechanism?
Hmm... but if they can take action without resolving the vote, why bother
with the vote at all?
> For smaller groups, I would rather have a smaller
> window for counting votes, rahter than give the secretary the power
> to close off the polls.
For technical committee decisions, that period is fixed at one week [and,
much of the delay in casting the votes has to do with when people check
their email]. I don't think changing the voting period works there.
> > Since we should recognize that a small number of people might want
> > to change their votes, I'd recommend "when the vote would no longer
> > be in doubt if no more than quorum voters change their current
> > ballots."
>
> What are the use cases for pushing for an early resolution?
> Have we ever been in a situation where a early decision was critical?
No, we haven't. Nor have we been in a situation where the ballot would
have been unambiguously determined before the end of the voting period.
I'm thinking the advantage here is a [minor] reduction in the red-tape
factor of our decision making. But, you're right it's a rare event
where this would be significant.
> BTW, people did revote on the last day of the DPL elections,
> and the narrowest victory was in single digit votes, ( 4 beats
> 2: 228 224 = 4 ). A voter would not have known a pariori whether the
> vote was close or not -- and this does add pressure to vote early,
> since your franchise would be worthless unless you got in early.
The outcome isn't unambigous in a situation like that. You can't assume
that the vote is determined ahead of the deadline unless it's true that
if every voter who hasn't voted votes against the current outcome (and,
for my proposal if quorum people change their votes from favoring the
current outcome to opposing it) the outcome remains unchanged.
> Also, I don't like this kind of power being added to the
> secretaries position.
Doesn't seem like much power to me.
Were you thinking that it didn't matter what people who hadn't voted
yet would vote?
Thanks,
--
Raul
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