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

[Aleksey Sanin <aleksey aleksey com>]

> - Security implications are the same unless proven otherwise (I've  
> already explained it in one of my previous mails)
>
> - Anonimity enables one to vote regardless of interrelations with any  
> candidate, thereby giving a more honest vote
I hate to tell you this but the security *is* different. Please consider 
a situation with something
happening in a closed dark room (anonimous voting) and something 
happening outside (open voting).
In both case, there are people who would be able to do things that 
nobody would notice.
But in the first case it's much more simple.

Next, the people votes are never honest ones. It's not an ideal world 
but real life. You have to admit that
not only candidate program, candidate expirience but also person's 
relationship with candidate makes
a lot of diference. IMHO, the reason "this guy opposed me in the flame 
war last week thus I would not vote
for him" is not much different from "this guy is my boss and I would 
vote for him".

Finally, as far as I can udnerstand the reason for this change is to 
introduce more democracy. However,
it's well known that the only rule that satisfy democracy pre-requisits 
is "dictatorship rule" when
everything happen as one person wishes. I could not find a good paper 
about this theorem and its proof
in google except this short article in Russian:

      http://kvant.mccme.ru/1992/10/demokratiya_s_tochki_zreniya_m.htm

But I found a paper that talks about this theorem and is interesting by 
itself:

(pdf)
http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Verwiss/Seibel/Blatter/Austen-Smith,Banks.pdf

(html)
http://216.239.33.104/search?q=cache:YEeTsenz_3gJ:www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Verwiss/Seibel/Blatter/Austen-Smith,Banks.pdf+democracy+%22dictatorship+rule%22+theorem&hl=en&ie=UTF-8


If you get closer to democracy then you get closer to dictatorship. This 
is the reason why current political
system *are not* fully democratic (but this moves our discussion far 
away from the subject).


Aleksey