3 ms·

The "graphical" page is a bit more interesting, I think, with a graph of how each option fared compared to the other ones: https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/g

by gwd 7y ago

The "graphical" page is a bit more interesting, I think, with a graph of how each option fared compared to the other ones: https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/ https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/ The ballot graph looks a bit strange to me. For one, votes seemed to come in all the way through the voting period, and actually increased just before the deadline. For two, nearly 20% of the ballots -- 100 out of 550 were rejected. I hope that's not evidence of "voting irregularities" -- the top 4 options were all within 50 points of each other. EDIT: From the bottom of the page: "Most of the bad ballots are due to the presence of a non printing character (usually one that displays as a space) in the ballot that confuses the parser. "

JoshTriplett 7y ago
> For one, votes seemed to come in all the way through the voting period, and actually increased just before the deadline. That doesn't seem surprising at all; many people vote (and rally others to vote) just under the wire. The same pattern appears in conference submission graphs; there's always a huge number of submissions on the last day.
owl57 7y ago
Wow. If 20% of the ballots are rejected in our next election due to some invisible garbage, the opposition and Western media will cry "they stopped even pretending to count the actual votes". Seriously, opinion on systemd and choice of software used to fill the ballot seem likely to be correlated.
the_why_of_y 7y ago
> For two, nearly 20% of the ballots -- 100 out of 550 were rejected. Of 552 ballots receieved, 548 passed "MIME Decoded" and 459 passed "Sig Check", with 452 Votes Tallied and 7 Bad Ballot - so, the vast majority of the failed ballots had invalid GPG signatures. This data doesn't tell you how many of the valid ballots were re-sends from voters who had previously sent in an invalid ballot.
- tytso 7y ago
  Note that you get an e-mail either saying that your vote was accepted, or that your vote was rejected and why (bad GPG signature, unrecognized GPG key, mangled ballot, etc.) So if someone screws up, they know and can resend. Also, you're allowed to send in a second ballot which supersedes your previous ballot, up until the deadline. So if you change your mind during the voting period, you can update your selection.
tialaramex 7y ago
> From the bottom of the page: "Most of the bad ballots are due to the presence of a non printing character (usually one that displays as a space) in the ballot that confuses the parser." Note that "Bad Ballot" is a specific category, with just seven such ballots counted in this vote, not 100. The dozens that were rejected much earlier failed GPG signature checks, which means _anybody_ might have sent those because if they had a signature from a Debian Developer it wasn't valid. I could have sent one (I am not a Debian Developer). I could have sent thousands of them! Most commonly what's going on is that somebody screwed up and either tries again soon after or reaches out to friends to ask er, wait, how do I do this routine voting thing again? I'd not be astonished if at least one person managed to screw up and not vote, but I would be shocked if it's enough people to actually matter. And I'd also question what the point is of being a "Debian Developer" if you can't follow the relatively simple instructions to vote. In say a General Election we have to cater for the widest possible demographic. For example in England the rules say that any "unambiguous" vote counts. The instructions say to put an X in a box, but if you use a tick, that's fine. If you ignore the boxes and write in block caps "I vote for Steve Smith to be our MP" that's still fine (assuming Steve was a candidate in this election) because everybody can see you wanted Steve. If you cross out two of five candidates, circle two others and draw a smiley face... we can't tell who you wanted, sorry, invalid ballot. But that's because we're trying to capture _every voter_ so it would defeat the purpose of the poll to insist upon technical competence by voters. Debian isn't trying to do that, quite rightly.

by gwd 7y ago

JoshTriplett 7y ago

> For one, votes seemed to come in all the way through the voting period, and actually increased just before the deadline. That doesn't seem surprising at all; many people vote (and rally others to vote) just under the wire. The same pattern appears in conference submission graphs; there's always a huge number of submissions on the last day.

owl57 7y ago

Wow. If 20% of the ballots are rejected in our next election due to some invisible garbage, the opposition and Western media will cry "they stopped even pretending to count the actual votes". Seriously, opinion on systemd and choice of software used to fill the ballot seem likely to be correlated.

the_why_of_y 7y ago

> For two, nearly 20% of the ballots -- 100 out of 550 were rejected. Of 552 ballots receieved, 548 passed "MIME Decoded" and 459 passed "Sig Check", with 452 Votes Tallied and 7 Bad Ballot - so, the vast majority of the failed ballots had invalid GPG signatures. This data doesn't tell you how many of the valid ballots were re-sends from voters who had previously sent in an invalid ballot.

tytso 7y ago
Note that you get an e-mail either saying that your vote was accepted, or that your vote was rejected and why (bad GPG signature, unrecognized GPG key, mangled ballot, etc.) So if someone screws up, they know and can resend. Also, you're allowed to send in a second ballot which supersedes your previous ballot, up until the deadline. So if you change your mind during the voting period, you can update your selection.

tialaramex 7y ago

> From the bottom of the page: "Most of the bad ballots are due to the presence of a non printing character (usually one that displays as a space) in the ballot that confuses the parser." Note that "Bad Ballot" is a specific category, with just seven such ballots counted in this vote, not 100. The dozens that were rejected much earlier failed GPG signature checks, which means _anybody_ might have sent those because if they had a signature from a Debian Developer it wasn't valid. I could have sent one (I am not a Debian Developer). I could have sent thousands of them! Most commonly what's going on is that somebody screwed up and either tries again soon after or reaches out to friends to ask er, wait, how do I do this routine voting thing again? I'd not be astonished if at least one person managed to screw up and not vote, but I would be shocked if it's enough people to actually matter. And I'd also question what the point is of being a "Debian Developer" if you can't follow the relatively simple instructions to vote. In say a General Election we have to cater for the widest possible demographic. For example in England the rules say that any "unambiguous" vote counts. The instructions say to put an X in a box, but if you use a tick, that's fine. If you ignore the boxes and write in block caps "I vote for Steve Smith to be our MP" that's still fine (assuming Steve was a candidate in this election) because everybody can see you wanted Steve. If you cross out two of five candidates, circle two others and draw a smiley face... we can't tell who you wanted, sorry, invalid ballot. But that's because we're trying to capture _every voter_ so it would defeat the purpose of the poll to insist upon technical competence by voters. Debian isn't trying to do that, quite rightly.