Election Data

inode0 inode0 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 23 12:45:05 UTC 2008


On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:14 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at 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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