Re: Informal Discussion: Identities of Voters Casting a Particular Ballot are No Longer Public

[Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org>]

On Wed, 2022-02-16 at 13:27 +0100, Gard Spreemann wrote:
> Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, 2022-02-14 at 18:47 -0700, Sam Hartman wrote:
> > > I think there are problematic uses of votes well beyond
> > > harassment
> > > though.
> > > 
> > > * After this, I think the next vote is going to be about
> > > firmware.
> > > Do we want companies like Nvidia who may have opinions about how
> > > distributions should think about freedom looking at how people
> > > vote
> > > when they consider hiring DDs?
> > 
> > They can already do the same for mailing list communication. Do we
> > want
> > to avoid this by making mailing lists non-public (subscribers only,
> > or
> > project members only depending on the list)?
> 
> By this token, votes in democratic countries needn't be secret,
> because there are channels in which people publicly express their
> opinions.

And indeed most votes are not secret such as:

 - votes in parliament or similar,
 - votes by shareholders of publically traded companies,
 - votes in general meetings of associations (maybe comparable to 
   the idea of GRs in Debian?),
 - votes in many decision bodies.

Some votes in these groups may be secret.

Sometimes individual votes are only visible to members (say for people
present at association meetings); for Debian this might be comparable
to having the tally sheet only visible to project members.

But you misunderstand the question: I asked why we insist on public
mailing lists if we are concerned about people possibly losing (or not
obtaining) jobs if they make their opinion known in some archived form.
There is no requirement to have lists such as -vote@ be a public list
if people feel unsafe if their opinion is publically archived.

Ansgar