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

[Janne <jan moren lucs lu se>]

On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 03:04, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 18:18, George wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 05:28:59PM -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> > > > Best course of action would be for the voting software to re-send the ballot
> > > > with a new unique key (same counter).  But that's getting quite anal.
> > > 
> > > So if I want to find out whether my subordinate indeed voted for me, I
> > > send a request from the employee's account for a new key. That yields
> > > the employee's serial number (first 3 digits) that suffice to look up
> > > the vote.
> > 
> > So if the key is re-made on requests (which is what I suggested) then you
> > don't.  
> 
> Read you own previous reply. You said `same counter'. So I can look up
> the vote. THe first 3 digits were supposedly unique.

The three sequence digits are only sufficient to look up whether the
person voted or not. You would need the entire key to look up what the
person voted for.


Anyway, I have been following this discussion with some amusement, then
trepidation, followed by bewildered frustration. Before I add the
subject to my spamlist, however, I must ask:

Why do you want to know how I vote?

I don't understand this. Open ballots give exactly zero more security
than closed ballots. The only reason I can see for opposing it that I
can see is that you want to know for whom I (or other people) voted. I
find that a bit disturbing, and in itself a very good argument for
closed voting.

The discussion has veered off on what voting mechanism to use. A better
order of events would be to first decide that closed voting is to be
used, rather than open voting (and, again, in light of this discussion I
would say closed votings seems long overdue). Once that has been
decided, we can bend our intellects to the system to be used.


-- 

Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.

Tel.    +46-046 222 8588             Dr. Janne Morén (mr)
Home:   +46-046 211 4973             Dept. of Cognitive Science
Fax:    +46-046 222 9758             Kungshuset, Lund
                                     S-222 22 Lund, Sweden