Election Data

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Mon Jul 28 17:06:32 UTC 2008


CLAY S wrote:
> Considering what's at stake, I believe it is 
> not too unreasonable for the Fedora community to change policy to make 
> future election data available to the public 

Really, I'd like this to be put to a vote by Fedora Contributors. 
Because the real question for releasing anonymized election data for the 
future is:  will people continue to vote if they know the data will be 
released anonymously.

I see no reason they wouldn't.  But if 25% of our active voters say they 
  would not vote if that were the case, then that's something we should 
listen to.

*Note: This is a slightly difficult thing to deal with in terms of 
making the decision.  A simple majority of voters shouldn't be able to 
open the election data as what we want to avoid doing is alienating 
voters.  Making the results non-binding isn't a very good idea either. 
Perhaps setting a percentage beforehand.  If the percentage of people 
who say they'll stop voting if the election data is released anonymously 
  is greater than a certain amount, then we won't do that.

Also -- we should be sure we are clear about what we are talking about 
releasing: anonymized individual ballots vs aggregate statistics (which 
we already do release for some elections).  and how we're going to do it 
(what tables exist in the db.  How we can select information from the 
tables so as not to associate the user with the data).

-Toshio

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