Re: Disclosing election results (was Re: Result Re: Call for Consensus - "Use 'Schulze STV' for voting")

On Mon, 02 Jun 2014 18:52:59 +0200, Daniel Glazman  
<daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote:

> On 02/06/2014 18:46, L. David Baron wrote:
>
>> Agreed.
>>
>> Though if we want to understand more about how changes in voting
>> systems would affect the results, it would be even more helpful to
>> have an anonymized list of ballots (so that we have the information
>> about which candidates were voted for *together*).

I agree.

>> I'm not sure if making that available would be considered to make
>> the data too de-anonymizable?

I'd be happy to have the pattern data, but not the candidate names - i.e.  
anonymize them so we can't figure out who romped in, who scraped in, and  
who was beaten out by a single vote - or only got 1.

I think doing that would also help ease the concern that such data might  
be perceived as de-ligitimising the actual elections.

If I had a concrete proposal, at this stage that is what I would be asking  
for.

> I agree but I think the disclosed data would be too complex to
> be readable in that case.

Nobody is forced to read it. It's for those who want to - and there are  
plenty of people who can. Having more data still makes it possible to  
provide summary info. Having less data just makes it necessary to guess  
what the extra data might have shown.

> In the election that just ended, there
> were 12 candidates for 5 seats, and ACs can select less than 5
> candidates if they want. The number of possible combinations is
> really too important.

Real people have figured this stuff out many many times for far larger  
elections, often with everything on pieces of paper. The number of  
combinations are not that complicated, and analysing this sort of data is  
something computers are really useful for. I really don't think complexity  
of the data is an issue here.

To be fair, nor did I think it was hard to see what's wrong with  
simplistic voting systems.

Anyway. We don't currently have so much as a proposal. Let alone any idea  
what W3C would do with one...

cheers

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Monday, 2 June 2014 19:06:40 UTC