Election Data

CLAY S clay at brokenladder.com
Wed Jul 23 16:31:00 UTC 2008


> Some people have countered that in public governmental elections, data is
not might public.

Apparently I had beer for breakfast.  CORRECTION: "..not _made_ public."

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 09:29, CLAY S <clay at brokenladder.com> wrote:

> Let me first thank you all for your input on this.
>
> I can understand the sentiment that to give out this data would be somehow
> problematic, since it wasn't originally stated that it would given out.
> However, if it is anonymized, how does that really violate the privacy of
> any voter?  In fact, you could even remove a random subset of the votes, so
> that even if a voter looked at what got published and saw a unique ballot
> identical to the one he cast, he would still have no certainty that it was
> his vote.  At that point we get into the philosophical realm of asking, how
> much do you have do dilute the data before it's no longer a concern?  In
> some sense the data for these elections (in which there was no warning of
> possible publication) is actually _more_ valuable, because if you were to
> add a notice that there would be anonymous usage analysis, fewer people
> might vote strategically.  (This kind of "irrational" behavior is the
> subject of a great Google lecture by Dan Ariely.)
>
> Some people have countered that in public governmental elections, data is
> not might public.  This is incorrect.  Many cities publish anonymous ballot
> results online.  Here in my home of San Francisco, for instance. (And of
> course, just because the government does something in their election
> process, that doesn't mean it's right - just look at the terrible plurality
> voting system that almost all municipalities use.)
>
> Of course we could also ask someone within Fedora to do the analysis, where
> we're primarily looking for things like the frequency of "polarized" ballots
> (all min and max scores), and other bits of data like the ones discussed
> here:
> http://rangevoting.org/HaikuIcon.html
>
> Whether or not this data can be made of any use for us, I'd still propose
> the notice in future elections that anonymous ballot data will be available
> after the election, either pre- or post-processing.  If that is what it
> would take to satisfy your ethical standards, I think there would be value
> in it.  In fact I think the voters themselves generally appreciate that kind
> of transparency more than they dislike it.
>
> Thanks again for your time.
>
> Clay
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 07:53, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> Paul W. Frields (stickster at 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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>>
>
>
>
> --
> clay shentrup
> phone: 206.801.0484
>
> "Iraq?  No, YOU rock!"
>



-- 
clay shentrup
phone: 206.801.0484

"Iraq?  No, YOU rock!"
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