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A brief summary because I had to re-read this a few times to figure out what was going on. Debian had a vote with 4 options: Option 1 "Hide identities of Deve

A brief summary because I had to re-read this a few times to figure out what was going on. Debian had a vote with 4 options: Option 1 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote" Option 2 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote and allow verification" Option 3 "Reaffirm public voting" Option 4 "None of the above" (NOTA) The objection raised here is that Option 3 and Option 4 can be considered to be the same depending on how you interpret them (ie; "None of the above" vs "Keep public ballots" which can be said to implicitly suggest none of the above at the same time). If those two were represented as a single "NOTA" option, that option would have won the ballot in terms of votes.

charcircuit 5y ago
By definition "none of the above" can't be the same as any of the above options.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  But then the question becomes, "if you don't want private votes and you don't want public votes, what do you want?"
  - rossvor 5y ago
    Something else which hasn't been suggested yet. Basically it could be that you are not opposed to the secret voting in principle, but you think current proposed options are not fully baked yet and you also think that current status quo is sub-optimal too.
  - cailie 5y ago
    Eliminate voting?
  - remram 5y ago
    Maybe you want for some votes to be public and some votes to be private. Putting "all votes should be {public,private}" in the constitution prevents that.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    A dictatorship [1]? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
- layer8 5y ago
  Option 1 is also a superset of option 2, strictly speaking. The whole set of options doesn’t really seem well-defined.
  - throwawaybutwhy 5y ago
    ...which is working as intended. This situation has all the hallmarks of a silent coup in the making.
kaba0 5y ago
I haven’t read the article, but isn’t debian’s voting orders the options? In which case 3 > 4 vs 4 > 3 wouldn’t really change the outcome.
- spondyl 5y ago
  Well, the claim here is that Option 3 and Option 4 are the same in essence so if they had been reflected on the ballot as a single option, then that option would have won out over Option 2, changing the outcome. Assuming I understand this anyway. The way the votes are reflected is confusing to me
  - dtech 5y ago
    They use ranked choice voting so this shouldn't matter, as far as I understand RCV eliminates the lowest option one-by-one, passing the votes to the next option on each ballot as if the eliminated option never existed. The discussion seems to be about ballots with 3 > 2 > 4, and when 3 was eliminated the votes went to 2, allowing it to pass. That's a bit strange because you'd expect a ballot to always have 3 next to 4 since they are so similar.
    - Sesse__ 5y ago
      Debian's vote system does not use instant runoff voting (which is eliminating the lowest options one by one). Instead, it uses Condorcet voting, which picks the options defeating all the others in pairwise competition. (If no such option exists, it gets more complicated. Also, the NOTA option is special and is used to check majority or supermajority requirements before the actual Condorcet process starts.)
      - kevinpet 5y ago
        Thank you. This is the first comment that clearly explained the issue.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      3 > 2 > 4 is very clear in that it means "I would most prefer to reaffirm public voting, but I do support secret voting so long as verification is allowed. I oppose secret voting without verification.". It's a meaningful vote. Why are people disagreeing about this?
zucker42 5y ago
Debian uses the Schulze method (if things haven't changed recently), so I do not see how that would have an impact on the result.
- contravariant 5y ago
  As far as I can tell the Schulze method does not satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition, and so adding an extra option can have an effect on the end result. However the upside is that you can actually recalculate what the result would have been if you remove one of the options, since the voting results are summarized as the number of people who prefer A to B, which shouldn't change if you remove one of the options.
  - nulbyte 5y ago
    If you remove option A, it would necessarily be a different outcome for someone who would have voted for A over B.
    - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
      I think what GP meant that if you have two identical option A and B, we could remove A after voting and it would have the same result as not having option in the first place.
      - sjmm1989 5y ago
        I think you got their intent in sharing their belief correct; but their belief is wrong. If you remove A as a choice, or B, people might go with their next preferred option instead of just not voting at all, etc. This means you can't know for sure that results would equal the same with or without that option, because you cannot actually assume all actors will vote the same every time. To even begin to think such a thing as true is just asinine when the world proves to us on a daily basis that people are willing to compromise on their beliefs all the time. (No offense.)
malthuswaswrong 5y ago
>If those two were represented as a single "NOTA" option, that option would have won the ballot in terms of votes. Looks like Option 1 and 2 were similar enough to "split the vote" too. What would have happened if 1 and 2 were combined and 3 and 4 were combined?
- cogman10 5y ago
  Does debian not do some sort of RCV? Split ticket only matters if the voting system is FPTP.
toast0 5y ago
> If those two were represented as a single "NOTA" option, that option would have won the ballot in terms of votes. If the ballot were different, the results would be too. You can't take the results of one ballot and mush them around to support a hypothetical result; see also counting of the 'popular vote' for US president, a ballot which has never been tried, and whose results are unknowable. A vote for 4 says (to me, not a qualified voter) I don't like the current voting, and hiding identities is also undesirable; if this choice is selected, the status quo must be continued until a new alternative is voted upon, but there's clearly desire to do so. If option 3 were selected, the status quo had clearly won, and the issue should be considered settled for whatever timeframe Debian considers appropriate.
- dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
  It's a binary decision. The only way to properly poll that is either rank choice voting or a second vote after voting to change or not.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Debian votes are ranked choice.
    - cosmojg 5y ago
      Specifically, they use the Schulze method[1] with ranked ballots, which is far better[2] than the IRV method popularized by FairVote[3] and currently making the rounds in the U.S. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method [2] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ [3] https://www.fairvote.org/ https://www.fairvote.org/
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Diluting the vote of your opponent/position is quite common. https://www.newsweek.com/russian-politician-discovers-2-men-using-same-name-running-against-him-elections-1629808?amp=1 https://www.newsweek.com/russian-politician-discovers-2-men-...
sjmm1989 5y ago
Stopped using Debian a long time ago, and this is just making me glad I did exactly that. What kind of hairbrained nimrod came up with that idea!? You can't have mixed voting methods and still call it fair in any respect. Any chance there could be tampering should be considered not just to be happening, but to be assured to happen. "Secret ballots" of any sort when everyone else is not partaking in said "Secret ballots" just creates a skew towards unfairness and improper results. Assuming those ballots truly are secret and not just pseudo-secret. If true secret, then there is no way to track properly for sure if there is tampering... I doubt anyone with Debian is going to be listening to me on this; but perhaps they should. Debian crew: No. Normal voting methods only dammit. Like they are going to listen though. In the meantime, I'll be using a different version of Linux. Debian has been dead to me for a long time now.
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  >Stopped using Debian a long time ago >I'll be using a different version of Linux. I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your reply, but these are nonsensical statements in context. It's presenting an assumption that the governance systems in other versions are better. I've seen a lot of projects with BDFL leaders and no voting whatsoever. Linux itself is famous for permanently keeping a BDFL in charge and not really having voting, so in some sense we might be able to say they all suffer from a lack of voting methods in some areas.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    With secret voting you can deflect responsibility and not really hold anybody accountable, with a benevolent dictator... er, well it can't be anybody but Linus' fault as all decisions flow through him.
    - throwaway82652 5y ago
      That is fundamentally different from what the parent reply is saying and that makes no sense either. The entire point of putting open source code out there for free with no warranty is to avoid accountability, in favor of more transparency. A BDFL is only legally accountable to those who pay their salary, and the companies that care about accountability will pay them in exchange for signing private long-term contracts.
phkahler 5y ago
So IMHO if you wanted to retain transparency and they use ranked voting, I'd go with 4,3,2,1. Someone else might do 3,4,2,1. Either way the result should be counted against secret voting. There seems to be concern that people don't even understand how the voting process works and messed up their ballot. Oddly, this should be verifiable by asking them, since secret voting wasn't in place at the time of this vote.
beojan 5y ago
Debian uses the Condorcet method, so I don't think this is actually a problem.
mjw1007 5y ago
It's not about splitting the vote in that way; Debian's system is robust to that. It's about the 3:1 supermajority requirement that was needed for Option 1 and Option 2. It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this.
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  > It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this. Yet Another case for approval voting over like, all other voting systems.
  - ClayShentrup 5y ago
    it's the simplified case of score voting, which is even even more accurate with a scale like 0-5. albeit at the cost of simplicity.
- rstuart4133 5y ago
  >It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this. And that the super majority was achieved by 1 vote. So in some sense it was a cliff hanger. But 3 to 1 is a large margin, which likely has a bit of fat. I'm not uncomfortable with it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CogitoCogito 5y ago
What does "reaffirm public voting" mean in this context? Would "reaffirm public voting" have resulted in concrete action that would not have occurred had "none of the above" won?

charcircuit 5y ago

By definition "none of the above" can't be the same as any of the above options.

beaconstudios 5y ago
But then the question becomes, "if you don't want private votes and you don't want public votes, what do you want?"
- rossvor 5y ago
  Something else which hasn't been suggested yet. Basically it could be that you are not opposed to the secret voting in principle, but you think current proposed options are not fully baked yet and you also think that current status quo is sub-optimal too.
- cailie 5y ago
  Eliminate voting?
- remram 5y ago
  Maybe you want for some votes to be public and some votes to be private. Putting "all votes should be {public,private}" in the constitution prevents that.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  A dictatorship [1]? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
layer8 5y ago
Option 1 is also a superset of option 2, strictly speaking. The whole set of options doesn’t really seem well-defined.
- throwawaybutwhy 5y ago
  ...which is working as intended. This situation has all the hallmarks of a silent coup in the making.

kaba0 5y ago

I haven’t read the article, but isn’t debian’s voting orders the options? In which case 3 > 4 vs 4 > 3 wouldn’t really change the outcome.

spondyl 5y ago
Well, the claim here is that Option 3 and Option 4 are the same in essence so if they had been reflected on the ballot as a single option, then that option would have won out over Option 2, changing the outcome. Assuming I understand this anyway. The way the votes are reflected is confusing to me
- dtech 5y ago
  They use ranked choice voting so this shouldn't matter, as far as I understand RCV eliminates the lowest option one-by-one, passing the votes to the next option on each ballot as if the eliminated option never existed. The discussion seems to be about ballots with 3 > 2 > 4, and when 3 was eliminated the votes went to 2, allowing it to pass. That's a bit strange because you'd expect a ballot to always have 3 next to 4 since they are so similar.
  - Sesse__ 5y ago
    Debian's vote system does not use instant runoff voting (which is eliminating the lowest options one by one). Instead, it uses Condorcet voting, which picks the options defeating all the others in pairwise competition. (If no such option exists, it gets more complicated. Also, the NOTA option is special and is used to check majority or supermajority requirements before the actual Condorcet process starts.)
    - kevinpet 5y ago
      Thank you. This is the first comment that clearly explained the issue.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    3 > 2 > 4 is very clear in that it means "I would most prefer to reaffirm public voting, but I do support secret voting so long as verification is allowed. I oppose secret voting without verification.". It's a meaningful vote. Why are people disagreeing about this?

zucker42 5y ago

Debian uses the Schulze method (if things haven't changed recently), so I do not see how that would have an impact on the result.

contravariant 5y ago
As far as I can tell the Schulze method does not satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition, and so adding an extra option can have an effect on the end result. However the upside is that you can actually recalculate what the result would have been if you remove one of the options, since the voting results are summarized as the number of people who prefer A to B, which shouldn't change if you remove one of the options.
- nulbyte 5y ago
  If you remove option A, it would necessarily be a different outcome for someone who would have voted for A over B.
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    I think what GP meant that if you have two identical option A and B, we could remove A after voting and it would have the same result as not having option in the first place.
    - sjmm1989 5y ago
      I think you got their intent in sharing their belief correct; but their belief is wrong. If you remove A as a choice, or B, people might go with their next preferred option instead of just not voting at all, etc. This means you can't know for sure that results would equal the same with or without that option, because you cannot actually assume all actors will vote the same every time. To even begin to think such a thing as true is just asinine when the world proves to us on a daily basis that people are willing to compromise on their beliefs all the time. (No offense.)

malthuswaswrong 5y ago

>If those two were represented as a single "NOTA" option, that option would have won the ballot in terms of votes. Looks like Option 1 and 2 were similar enough to "split the vote" too. What would have happened if 1 and 2 were combined and 3 and 4 were combined?

cogman10 5y ago
Does debian not do some sort of RCV? Split ticket only matters if the voting system is FPTP.

toast0 5y ago

> If those two were represented as a single "NOTA" option, that option would have won the ballot in terms of votes. If the ballot were different, the results would be too. You can't take the results of one ballot and mush them around to support a hypothetical result; see also counting of the 'popular vote' for US president, a ballot which has never been tried, and whose results are unknowable. A vote for 4 says (to me, not a qualified voter) I don't like the current voting, and hiding identities is also undesirable; if this choice is selected, the status quo must be continued until a new alternative is voted upon, but there's clearly desire to do so. If option 3 were selected, the status quo had clearly won, and the issue should be considered settled for whatever timeframe Debian considers appropriate.

dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
It's a binary decision. The only way to properly poll that is either rank choice voting or a second vote after voting to change or not.
- toast0 5y ago
  Debian votes are ranked choice.
  - cosmojg 5y ago
    Specifically, they use the Schulze method[1] with ranked ballots, which is far better[2] than the IRV method popularized by FairVote[3] and currently making the rounds in the U.S. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method [2] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ [3] https://www.fairvote.org/ https://www.fairvote.org/
- treeman79 5y ago
  Diluting the vote of your opponent/position is quite common. https://www.newsweek.com/russian-politician-discovers-2-men-using-same-name-running-against-him-elections-1629808?amp=1 https://www.newsweek.com/russian-politician-discovers-2-men-...

sjmm1989 5y ago

Stopped using Debian a long time ago, and this is just making me glad I did exactly that. What kind of hairbrained nimrod came up with that idea!? You can't have mixed voting methods and still call it fair in any respect. Any chance there could be tampering should be considered not just to be happening, but to be assured to happen. "Secret ballots" of any sort when everyone else is not partaking in said "Secret ballots" just creates a skew towards unfairness and improper results. Assuming those ballots truly are secret and not just pseudo-secret. If true secret, then there is no way to track properly for sure if there is tampering... I doubt anyone with Debian is going to be listening to me on this; but perhaps they should. Debian crew: No. Normal voting methods only dammit. Like they are going to listen though. In the meantime, I'll be using a different version of Linux. Debian has been dead to me for a long time now.

throwaway82652 5y ago
>Stopped using Debian a long time ago >I'll be using a different version of Linux. I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your reply, but these are nonsensical statements in context. It's presenting an assumption that the governance systems in other versions are better. I've seen a lot of projects with BDFL leaders and no voting whatsoever. Linux itself is famous for permanently keeping a BDFL in charge and not really having voting, so in some sense we might be able to say they all suffer from a lack of voting methods in some areas.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  With secret voting you can deflect responsibility and not really hold anybody accountable, with a benevolent dictator... er, well it can't be anybody but Linus' fault as all decisions flow through him.
  - throwaway82652 5y ago
    That is fundamentally different from what the parent reply is saying and that makes no sense either. The entire point of putting open source code out there for free with no warranty is to avoid accountability, in favor of more transparency. A BDFL is only legally accountable to those who pay their salary, and the companies that care about accountability will pay them in exchange for signing private long-term contracts.

phkahler 5y ago

So IMHO if you wanted to retain transparency and they use ranked voting, I'd go with 4,3,2,1. Someone else might do 3,4,2,1. Either way the result should be counted against secret voting. There seems to be concern that people don't even understand how the voting process works and messed up their ballot. Oddly, this should be verifiable by asking them, since secret voting wasn't in place at the time of this vote.

beojan 5y ago

Debian uses the Condorcet method, so I don't think this is actually a problem.

mjw1007 5y ago

It's not about splitting the vote in that way; Debian's system is robust to that. It's about the 3:1 supermajority requirement that was needed for Option 1 and Option 2. It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this.

naniwaduni 5y ago
> It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this. Yet Another case for approval voting over like, all other voting systems.
- ClayShentrup 5y ago
  it's the simplified case of score voting, which is even even more accurate with a scale like 0-5. albeit at the cost of simplicity.
rstuart4133 5y ago
>It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this. And that the super majority was achieved by 1 vote. So in some sense it was a cliff hanger. But 3 to 1 is a large margin, which likely has a bit of fat. I'm not uncomfortable with it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CogitoCogito 5y ago

What does "reaffirm public voting" mean in this context? Would "reaffirm public voting" have resulted in concrete action that would not have occurred had "none of the above" won?