Re: Democracy in Debian

[Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 08:47:10AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On 8 Feb 2006, Lionel Elie Mamane said:
>> On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 06:57:03PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>>> On 7 Feb 2006, Lionel Elie Mamane spake thusly:

>>>> Should the situation arise with the current constitution, the
>>>> secretary can use 7.1.4 to avoid impropriety

>>> Additionally, there are already means of doing an audit that
>>> can check any results after the fact;

>> Only if the secretary hands over the ballots. Which I don't see him
>> being forced to do by constitutional rule. I'm not intimate with
>> all the commas of the constitution; can the secretary make a vote
>> "secret ballot" like the DPL election?

>         Which only goes to show that you really do not understand
>  how Debian works. Are you not aware that vote have already been
>  audited before? That anyone with root on master already has access
>  to all ballots? That the DPL's can ask an audot to be poerformed
>  anyway?

I didn't see such a specific DPL power in the constitution. Would it
fall under the general phrasing of 5.1.4?

>         You think the Secretary hides ballots on machines not
>  accessible to the DSA?

I don't think you currently do, nor that you ever did, nor that any of
your predecessors did. But the constitution says:

 Votes are cast by email in a manner suitable to the Secretary.

So if the Secretary deems it suitable to send them to an address out
of control of DSA, what happens?


There is a difference between what the constitution requires to happen
and what happens in practice. People can do things _better_ than
required by the constitution and seem to do so.


>         I really think you need to familiarize yourself with the
>  constitution if you want to start talking about how the secretary
>  can hijack elections, and thus must be restrained.

I thought about this a while ago (to decide whether the Debian system
could be used in another context) and what I remember from my
conclusions was:

 - Votes were ballots get revealed seem safe; one would have to break
   the OpenPGP signature system to "hijack" them. This assumes that
   "many" people can get access to the actual signed ballots.

 - The secretary acts as a trusted person for secret ballot
   elections. Unless someone else sees the actual signed ballots
   (which the constitution doesn't require), he can "stuff" the vote
   with fake ballots of people that haven't voted at all (I presume
   that people that didn't make the effort to vote are quite unlikely
   to make the effort to check that they are not on the voter's list)
   or are unlikely to check their entry in the tally sheet.

   (Trusted person = person that has the ability to break the security
    of the system)


-- 
Lionel