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Re: Secret ballot and RMS Resolution



On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 09:47:51AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I didn't quite parse that, so I'm not sure if this is what you were
> already proposing, but I wonder if we should just have secret ballots for
> all votes.

My bad for my previous non-parsable paragraph. I was proposing something
less radical (namely: secret vote for elections + decision by the
secretary for all other votes). That was in the spirit of minimizing
changes to the Constitution. But upon reflection I think your proposal
is just better.

Non-secret voting is useful and important for the votes cast by elected
representatives (e.g., in parliaments), because it provides
accountability. But all GRs in Debian are referendums, where everyone
votes for themselves, without having to be accountable to anyone else.

So, yeah, I (now) see no point any more in having non-secret votes in
Debian.

(There's the marginal advantage of verifiability that you point out, but
if either DSA or the Secretary are not trusted, we already have a major
problem anyway. And both bodies have ways to interfere with voting even
today with non-secret votes: ballot stuffing on behalf of inactive
accounts, dropping ballots of people who will not verify, etc.)

Cheers
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »


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