[atlarge-discuss] ELECTION REPORT

["J-F C. (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@club-internet.fr>]

To address some concerns of Sotiris Sotiropoulos who did not understand 
what I explained several times (but that Mauro understood), I will do it 
again. Maybe someone of High Level English Dialect will be so kind as to 
translate my Frenglish to him? Thank you.

The votes are received on the atlarge@execlub.org mailing list.
There is an auto responder.

This is a Mailman mailing list turned to remove mailnames. This list 
includes Eric and Bruce. We initially included the watchdogs, but we 
discovered - and they protested - that the anonymisation did not protected 
them against several practices of the Members which disclosed their identity:
1. leaving the anti-spam mention of their name
2. copying the ballot to another of their mailbox before voting: the header 
of the transfer or their name being then plain in the text
3. the Message-Id contains very often the name of the host
4. many responses came in HTML and were unreadable in ASCII...

So I developed a program I only intended to develop on Sunday next. It 
strips from the text every information except the message-id until the @, 
and keeps the ballot lines in the same proper format. Each ballot is 
numbered. The resulting file is sent to the Watchdogs on a daily basis. 
This file starts with the initial position of the main Eudora file and ends 
with the main Eudora file current position. This should permit (if needed) 
to only send a file to the watchdogs with the data of the day, while 
permitting them to check the continuity of the data. Again Eric and Bruce 
have all the data by their own and no relation with me. They can easily 
check the file they receive against the data they receive.

Each Polling Officer receives one copy, I receive 2 because I have a second 
name for backup where I receive the ballot on a daily basis. There is also 
a third source of ballots: the return for a changed e-mail or from an 
anti-spam system.

Each received ballot is numbered. So any attempt to add/remove a ballot 
would result in the change of the numbering. Watchdogs would be able to see 
that inconsistency immediately in comparing the number of the last message 
in the previous day file and in the current day file. I will not detail all 
the ways to go through the file and detect a possible tampering: anyone can 
think of many of them.

This file is accompanied with a file giving how many copies were received 
per VID and if the vote occurred (non voted ballot are obviusly retained 
but not considered). Only the first voted ballot counts.

At the end of the vote, the whole watchodg file will be put at the disposal 
of the Members. It could be copied to them right now, but this would permit 
them to know the current status of the vote, what was not voted by the 
committee.

Problems we met:
1. the report of a few non-responses by the auto-responder. I received a 
response when I tested after Sotiris reported the problem. But I did not 
received one when I voted. I prefer not to investigate and not to interfere 
in something which works to the risk of blocking the list or losing the 
archives.

2.the reported problem I reported above: that voters tend to disclose their 
identity. In a DNSO vote this is not a  problem as the watchdogs have been 
elected. In this vote where watchdogs are self nominated the answer had to 
respect the rules and procedures we had set and announced. I note that I 
prefer myself self-nominated watchdogs and strong rules: minorities can 
then be represented. Sotiris could have decided to be a watchdog and would 
have been one.

I will try to add an automated report today to inform the Membership on the 
situation of the vote.

Currently:

116 Members have voted.
The candidate with the largest number of votes has 53 votes.
The 11th candidate has 33 votes
The 27th candidate has 4 votes.
Up to now Members have voted in average for 7 candidates and answered 52 
questions per ballot.
jfc


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