From: dseal@armltd.co.uk (David Seal)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Impropriety in soc.culture.tamil vote (Re: soc.culture.tamil
Date: 17 Aug 92 17:25:15 GMT
Distribution: news
Organization: A.R.M. Ltd, Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambs, UK

In article <1992Aug14.221326.15445@cbnewsi.cb.att.com>
alok@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (alok.vijayvargia) writes:

>Point is that he was along with a group of other people
>in proposing the group and carrying the RFD. He or the other 
>organizers on his behalf conducted an email campaign during the vote
>exhorting the votes, asking people to vote YES or abstain from voting.
>One person has indicated so in his post. This is unethical in my opinion.

But it isn't your opinion that counts, it's the general opinion of
sysadmins. And the net.precedent on this, as far as I understand it, is that
there is nothing whatsoever wrong with people in general campaigning for
votes during the voting period.

What *is* wrong is the vote-taker himself campaigning, because he is in the
privileged position of knowing the partial vote results. It is also wrong
for the vote-taker to disclose partial results to anyone else, even by
implication. E.g. telling a friend during the vote "The vote isn't going
well; you'd better run that email campaign we talked about" would be grounds
for cancelling the vote, because the vote-taker has said something about the
partial results. Telling him during the vote that he'd better run the email
campaign without saying that the vote is going badly is also wrong, because
the vote-taker is *implying* that the email campaign will make a significant
difference to the vote results.

But agreeing with the friend *before the vote* that the friend will run the
email campaign and the vote-taker will count the votes is fine, as long as
the friend has no information *during the vote* about how the vote is going.

So to overturn the vote, you need one of the following:

  * Evidence that the vote-taker himself campaigned for votes;

  * Evidence that he disclosed something about how the vote was going to
    another person.

Evidence that a friend of the vote-taker campaigned for votes is *not*
enough, unless it is accompanied by evidence that the vote-taker disclosed
something to that friend.

>Assume for a moment that he [the vote-taker] is innocent and nothing wrong happened.
>Why is he then refusing to provide the data requested from him for last
>25 days ?.

One simple suggestion: the cost of email. Do you realise how many kilobytes
the text of all the votes in even a small poll would add up to, and how much
it would cost to send them to everyone who took it into their heads to check
the results? Even the abbreviated form of the results that is posted on
news.groups and news.announce.newgroups is often a long document...

On top of the financial cost is the cost in the vote-taker's time of merging
all the votes into a suitable number of parts (they can't be sent all in one
message because of the widespread limit of 100k on email messages) and
mailing them.

Finally, there is no reason why the vote-taker should be expected to spend
this time and money. You have got the voters' email addresses; if you want
to know whether the votes are genuine, send them all email saying that you
are worried that there have been irregularities in the voting process and
asking them (a) whether they did indeed vote the way the results say they
did; (b) whether the vote-taker asked them to do so; (c) whether anybody
asked them to do so in a way that indicated they knew how the vote was
going.

You will probably get a fairly small proportion of responses, but it should
be big enough to detect any widespread cheating. And the only big email bill
will be yours - which is fair enough...

David Seal
dseal@armltd.co.uk

All opinions are mine only...