On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 09:47:51AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Stefano Zacchiroli <z...@debian.org> writes: > > > This is probably something that should be fixed in the Constitution, by > > mandating secret voting for elections whereas living to the judgment of > > the secretary whether other GR votes should be secret or not. > > I didn't quite parse that, so I'm not sure if this is what you were > already proposing, but I wonder if we should just have secret ballots for > all votes. That avoids the argument over whether a given vote should be a > secret ballot. I admit to being endlessly curious about the opinions of > my fellow contributors, but that's just me being nosy and I don't have any > real reason to need to know. Secret ballots seem like they would be > reassuring for the people who are the least willing to be vocal on mailing > lists. > > In the current on-line landscape, I think it's also incumbent on any > organization to look for ways in which their procedures or tools could be > used for harassment and to try to make them safer, and secret ballots seem > like an obvious thing for us to do here. > > The obvious difficulty with secret ballots is that it requires a lot of > trust in the votetaker. We have a verification process for people to > check whether their vote was recorded correctly, but I don't think there's > any good way with our style of secret ballot to verify that the votetaker > didn't add new votes that no one actually sent. But (a) personally I am > not worried about the Project Secretary manipulating the vote, and (b) I > can think of a few ways to deal with that should that ever be enough of a > concern, such as having a small number of people trusted with confidential > information jointly double-check the tally. > > This obviously would have an impact on the Project Secretary, so I'd love > to hear Kurt and Neil's opinion about the possible merits of going to > secret ballots for all votes.
I could move to voting software like Belenios that only supports secret votes and has a way that doesn't require trust in (just) the Secretary. Kurt
