Election Data

To whom it may concern:

As a concerned citizen, deeply committed to improving the long term peace and prosperity of my species, I am requesting *anonymous* ballot results for your recent score voting elections - purely for scientific study.* It is my sincere belief that such data, however anecdotal it might be, is the closest we can come to the sort of ballot data we would see if score voting had been used in political elections, since the Fedora elections are actually consequential (unlike, say, polls).


Here are some links which underscore my sense that this issue is incredibly import for humanity's long-term best interest:
http://rangevoting.org/LivesSaved.html

http://rangevoting.org/RelImport.html
http://rangevoting.org/WorldProblems.html

This sort of data was made available for the HaikuOS icon selection: http://rangevoting.org/HaikuIcon.html


Debian also makes their election data public, though they use a worse and much more complex Condorcet method, called "Shulze".
http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/leader2003_tally.txt


Regards,
Clay
--
clay shentrup
phone: 206.801.0484

"Iraq? No, YOU rock!"

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On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 23:06 -0700, CLAY S wrote:
> To whom it may concern:
>
> As a concerned citizen, deeply committed to improving the long term
> peace and prosperity of my species, I am requesting *anonymous* ballot
> results for your recent score voting elections - purely for scientific
> study. It is my sincere belief that such data, however anecdotal it
> might be, is the closest we can come to the sort of ballot data we
> would see if score voting had been used in political elections, since
> the Fedora elections are actually consequential (unlike, say, polls).
>
> Here are some links which underscore my sense that this issue is
> incredibly import for humanity's long-term best interest:
> http://rangevoting.org/LivesSaved.html
> http://rangevoting.org/RelImport.html
> http://rangevoting.org/WorldProblems.html
>
> This sort of data was made available for the HaikuOS icon selection:
> http://rangevoting.org/HaikuIcon.html
>
> Debian also makes their election data public, though they use a worse
> and much more complex Condorcet method, called "Shulze".
> http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/leader2003_tally.txt

I don't see a huge problem with this as long as the ballots are
anonymized. Vote data is often analyzed for trends and other purposes,
and with Fedora being an open, transparent project overall, I think this
request doesn't go counter to our goals. But I think the Board should
probably make this decision.

--
Paul W. Frields
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://paul.frields.org/ - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 12:14 +0000, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 23:06 -0700, CLAY S wrote:
> > To whom it may concern:
> >
> > As a concerned citizen, deeply committed to improving the long term
> > peace and prosperity of my species, I am requesting *anonymous* ballot
> > results for your recent score voting elections - purely for scientific
> > study. It is my sincere belief that such data, however anecdotal it
> > might be, is the closest we can come to the sort of ballot data we
> > would see if score voting had been used in political elections, since
> > the Fedora elections are actually consequential (unlike, say, polls).
> >
> > Here are some links which underscore my sense that this issue is
> > incredibly import for humanity's long-term best interest:
> > http://rangevoting.org/LivesSaved.html
> > http://rangevoting.org/RelImport.html
> > http://rangevoting.org/WorldProblems.html
> >
> > This sort of data was made available for the HaikuOS icon selection:
> > http://rangevoting.org/HaikuIcon.html
> >
> > Debian also makes their election data public, though they use a worse
> > and much more complex Condorcet method, called "Shulze".
> > http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/leader2003_tally.txt
>
> I don't see a huge problem with this as long as the ballots are
> anonymized. Vote data is often analyzed for trends and other purposes,
> and with Fedora being an open, transparent project overall, I think this
> request doesn't go counter to our goals. But I think the Board should
> probably make this decision.

Nigel Jones just suggested that we might want to instead provide
anonymized data from the release name voting, which is probably less
controversial since no governance was involved. You might even be able
to make the case that the release name election is more contentious. ;-)


--
Paul W. Frields
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://paul.frields.org/ - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:14 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 23:06 -0700, CLAY S wrote:
>> To whom it may concern:
>>
>> As a concerned citizen, deeply committed to improving the long term
>> peace and prosperity of my species, I am requesting *anonymous* ballot
>> results for your recent score voting elections - purely for scientific
>> study. It is my sincere belief that such data, however anecdotal it
>> might be, is the closest we can come to the sort of ballot data we
>> would see if score voting had been used in political elections, since
>> the Fedora elections are actually consequential (unlike, say, polls).
>>
>> Here are some links which underscore my sense that this issue is
>> incredibly import for humanity's long-term best interest:
>> http://rangevoting.org/LivesSaved.html
>> http://rangevoting.org/RelImport.html
>> http://rangevoting.org/WorldProblems.html
>>
>> This sort of data was made available for the HaikuOS icon selection:
>> http://rangevoting.org/HaikuIcon.html
>>
>> Debian also makes their election data public, though they use a worse
>> and much more complex Condorcet method, called "Shulze".
>> http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/leader2003_tally.txt
>
> I don't see a huge problem with this as long as the ballots are
> anonymized. Vote data is often analyzed for trends and other purposes,
> and with Fedora being an open, transparent project overall, I think this
> request doesn't go counter to our goals. But I think the Board should
> probably make this decision.

I'd like to understand more precisely what this would mean since there
has been reluctance to analyze the data in various ways proposed
internally in the past.

John

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On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 12:42 +0000, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> Nigel Jones just suggested that we might want to instead provide
> anonymized data from the release name voting, which is probably less
> controversial since no governance was involved. You might even be able
> to make the case that the release name election is more
> contentious. ;-)
>

-1 to giving out ANY election data in any form other than the final
result. We didn't say we would distribute this information before people
chose to vote, so we don't give it out.

-sv


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On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster@gmail.com> wrote:

> controversial since no governance was involved. You might even be able
> to make the case that the release name election is more contentious. ;-)

And hopefully has better turnout. Not to hijack a thread, but there
*has* to be something that we can do to get better than 8% voter
turnout - not sure what that something is, but it's gotta be out there
somewhere

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On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 08:45:24AM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 12:42 +0000, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > Nigel Jones just suggested that we might want to instead provide
> > anonymized data from the release name voting, which is probably less
> > controversial since no governance was involved. You might even be able
> > to make the case that the release name election is more
> > contentious. ;-)
> >
>
> -1 to giving out ANY election data in any form other than the final
> result. We didn't say we would distribute this information before people
> chose to vote, so we don't give it out.

I'm with Seth on this one.

There are a couple comparisons we could draw:

1) County election officials don't hand out the used paper ballots to
the party election offices - they have to get their data through
in-person polls.

2) County election officials analyze "butterfly ballots" to deterimine
"intent of the voter" and look for patterns when it seems odd they
voted mostly by straight party lines but with a few oddballs
(votes, not politicians :-) that physical placement might describe.
We have no such problem here - it's a straight alphabetical
listing.

If we make it clear in the future we might publish anonymous data for
statistical evaluation, would that discourage any individual from
voting their conscience? Would we have to make that opt-out too? :-(
I don't think so to either, but let's hear from more people on this
point.

-Matt

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On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Matt Domsch wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 08:45:24AM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 12:42 +0000, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > > Nigel Jones just suggested that we might want to instead provide
> > > anonymized data from the release name voting, which is probably less
> > > controversial since no governance was involved. You might even be able
> > > to make the case that the release name election is more
> > > contentious. ;-)
> > >
> >
> > -1 to giving out ANY election data in any form other than the final
> > result. We didn't say we would distribute this information before people
> > chose to vote, so we don't give it out.
>
> I'm with Seth on this one.
>

Me too, though thats not to say for the next election we couldn't have a
notice explaining we'd be using the data sans user identification for
scientific research.

-Mike

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On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath@redhat.com> wrote:
> Me too, though thats not to say for the next election we couldn't have a
> notice explaining we'd be using the data sans user identification for
> scientific research.

If it is going to be used for research please consider having Fedora
do some of it themselves.

There are a lot of questions that one can think of that would be
interesting to know the answers to. Which subsets of Fedora,
identifiable subgroups, are voting in what proportions? Would the
results be any different with a less cumbersome voting method? Heck,
even keeping the actual voting data confidential but providing a
voluntary survey that voters could fill out at the same time might be
able to yield some information that could be very useful to future
thinking about elections. That might be able to capture relevant
information in the same way exit polls do now in other contexts.

John

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Paul W. Frields (stickster@gmail.com) said:
> > Debian also makes their election data public, though they use a worse
> > and much more complex Condorcet method, called "Shulze".
> > http://www.debian.org/vote/2003/leader2003_tally.txt
>
> I don't see a huge problem with this as long as the ballots are
> anonymized. Vote data is often analyzed for trends and other purposes,
> and with Fedora being an open, transparent project overall, I think this
> request doesn't go counter to our goals. But I think the Board should
> probably make this decision.

Considering that we didn't actually state before the election that
we would collect, anonymize, and mine the data, I don't think it's
a good idea to do that now.

Bill

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