[Osmf-talk] Articles of Association Update 2.0

[Dan S]

2014-07-24 10:16 GMT+01:00 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:
> Hi,
>
> On 07/24/14 10:46, Roland Ramthun wrote:
>> Election secrecy is used to protect against political,
>> economical and physical pressure of the voter. It is a method against
>> bribery, too (take the money, but vote what you feel).
>
> With a secret election run - as we currently do it - by three
> individuals, you only need to exert enough political, economical, or
> physical pressure on those three to rig the whole election.
>
> If the vote is public, you need to buy a lot more than three people to
> actually make a difference - and you would risk a lot because it would
> only take one of them to call you out.

Frederik, your reply implicitly assumes that the level of pressure
needed to rig a handful of personal votes is equivalent to the level
needed to rig an entire election. This is false. The three people
running the election would have a hell of a lot to lose if they rigged
the vote and were found out. The social cost of abusing the position
of authority is much worse than that of a single misplaced vote.


>> I would not like to see the already weak level of secrecy we have with
>> the OSMF voting further degraded and not just for general reasons, but
>> because I can imagine specific situations where e.g. economical
>> pressure plays a role for our voters.
>
> A valid argument surely - as long as we make sure that those three who
> run the election are not chosen from that segment of members you imagine
> to be likely to sell their allegiance!

As above.


> It's all not terribly important at the moment because there's little to
> gain from rigging any of our elections or decisions, but personally I
> would feel a lot safer with public votes - you are right in saying that
> this would allow would-be vote buyers to control who has voted in their
> favour, but I like the fact that at least everyone could then see who
> voted for the vote-buyer.

Vote-rigging is only likely to happen when it's tipping the balance in
a closely-run vote. In such a case there is no benefit in public
voting since the majority of votes for the vote-buyer were legitimate,
and the public does not say "how is that possible, I don't know anyone
who would have voted for that". So, I personally think that public
voting doesn't have much appeal, and private voting has the benefits
of avoiding "me too" herd effect and other social biasing effects.


Everyone please note: We do NOT need security at the level of national
elections. There's a cost-benefit tradeoff in choosing a voting
mechanism.

I'm generally happy with the lo-fi vote-by-email approach, as long as
the OSMF thinks they can run it practically. Someone pointed out that
email spoofing is an easy way to break an election. Would this be
fixed if all vote emails received a reply to confirm? Would that be
practical?

Dan