Re: Yes to Publicity! Not to Anonimit! Was: Re: GNOME Foundation Annual Elections - proposal

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 20:35, Sergey Panov wrote:
> I agree that anonymity in this particular case is bad. Believe me,
> nobody will come for you in the middle of the night if your vote was for
> the loosing side(person).

But if that person is your co-maintainer? co-translator? co-worker?
They're not going to shoot or beat you, but they can make something that
should be fun very unpleasant.

I'm not aware of any modern democracy that practices 'open' voting, and
such voting is typically considered a hallmark of repressive
pseudo-democracies. More relevantly, I'm not aware of any
non-governmental bodies that practice open voting either- even my
elementary school realized that voting in the open was a recipe for peer
pressure influence.

Given that open voting is so unusual, I think we have to presume that
closed/anonymous voting is the right thing and the burden of proof must
be on those advocating closed voting. And I've not seen anything in this
thread demonstrating why 2,000 years of democratic practice is wrong and
open voting is correct.

Luis

> On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 13:36, Aleksey Sanin wrote:
> > Mike,
> > 
> > Thanks for your response! I absolutely don't want to start flame war 
> > here. I raised
> > these issues only because I would like to have people think about that.
> > 
> > >Anonymous voting gives them freedom to vote entirely based on 
> > >this information, and not on other peoples perceptions of their vote.
> > >  
> > >
> > I don't think that freedom can come without responsibility. If you make
> > descision (you vote) than you need to take responsibility for  this.
> > Irresponsible descision makers made a lot of bad things thru human history.
> > Some of these descisions might have been different if people making them
> > knew that the had had to be responsible for what they are doing. Anonymous
> > voting removes responsibility from voter and I feel that this is a bad 
> > thing.
> > 
> > >No system of election is perfect but we have two advantages - people
> > >smart enough to build good checks and balances into the system, and an
> > >electorate with the broadly common goal of making GNOME successful.
> > >
> > >At the very worst under anonymous voting, people would just go ahead and
> > >vote exactly how they would have done anyway. At best, we all get to
> > >vote how we really think.
> > >
> > I would like to repeat that I don't think that  introducing the 
> > anonymous voting today can
> > cause any immidiate problems. You are right, currently we have good 
> > people in the
> > community and good people in charge of elections. However things change and
> > we might have  a different situation tomorrow. The proposed change is 
> > basicaly
> > a change in the political system of GNOME Foundation. Thus I feel that 
> > we need
> > to be very carefull, think ahead and plan the system to work in changed 
> > conditions too.
> > 
> > 
> > Aleksey
> > 
> > 
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